The Hype
Based on research, Slack has been widely used by numerous companies as a collaborative tool within their organisations. It has more than 5 million daily active users and more than 60,000 teams around the world. (Ref: https://uxdesign.cc/the-best-slack-groups-for-ux-designers-25c621673d9c)
It seems Slack has been successful in fulfilling its mission of “making users’ work simpler, more pleasant, and more productive”.
According to Slack Competitive Analysis conducted by emaze, the following are the advantages that make Slack attractive to use.
Or have they really been successful?
We use Slack as our official course communication tool and a means for sharing files, but strangely, we still hear that Slack is not a very intuitive tool to use. What then are its underlying limitations? Are these limitations minor enough to be overlooked? Or are they subtly stagnating the further increase in the number of active Slack users globally? With these questions in mind, our team of three went on a mission to explore the tool.
The Research
While exploring Slack, we found that there are differences within the mobile app itself between iOS and Android versions (the latter rather similar to the desktop version), in terms of:
- User interface, e.g. three-horizontal-dots menu at the bottom of the homepage (iOS) vs drop-down from ‘Home’ at the top left (Android),
- Terminology, e.g. ‘Direct Message’ (iOS) vs ‘Conversation’ (Android), and
- Navigational flow, e.g. starring or pinning message or item.
User feedback given during interviews agreed that Slack has some good functionalities which help solve business problems, like bookmarking messages via star and pin, enabling users to call others with the app without getting their phone numbers, or even the ‘talk-to-yourself’ function to keep drafts.
On the other hand, other feedback included comments that:
- “Slack is just a forced messaging tool enforced by the company. (As such, I) do not bother exploring beyond the messaging and file sharing features.”
- “Even though the app is encouraged for work, most of us are still communicating via email and WhatsApp.”
As consolidated in the affinity mapping below, users confirmed the following:
- Slack is not intuitive, e.g. workspace icon at top left works as a back button,
- Use of features can be confusing, e.g. difference between ‘add image’ and ‘add file’ icons,
- Functionalities may be useful but users are not aware of their existence or what these functionalities can do to help them, e.g. slash function.
Users ascertained that they would like to use the app for collaboration, but the current version is not intuitive to use because the features are difficult to understand. This led to users only minimally using Slack for work and other tools, such as WhatsApp and Skype, for their personal purposes. There were extreme cases where users actually requested their team members to communicate with them solely via WhatsApp.
Our Revamp Focus
Through our user interviews, we identified that our target users were driven by the need for an easy-to-use tool to communicate efficiently and effective, and be able to share files of different formats. Their pain points from using Slack were the unclear functions and features (e.g. slash icon in chat), unclear labels (e.g. threads and channels), and navigational issues (e.g. to star or pin a message/item).
“Slack’s specialisation in Channels, File Sharing/Archive, and Integrations are the essence of the product, and are fundamental to its position in the market.” (Ref. https://www.emaze.com/@ALQIQZIC)
So we decided to focus on group collaboration, file sharing, and archiving, which coincide with the main functionalities we use for our course. Due to time constraints in our tight project timeline, we concentrated our revamp efforts mainly on the iOS mobile app which seems to be slightly more intuitive than the Android version.
The following depicts the customer journey mapping of Jessica, whom we named our persona figure representing our targeted users, based on the focussed areas drawn out above.
There are a few threads used in Slack for communication — public channel, private channel, and direct message. Before users have access to any of these channels, the workspace administrator first grants the user access. Public channel is used by groups or departments comprising many members, e.g. in organisations or for an entire educational institution’s cohort.
Users, however, can create private channel and direct message and use them for group and direct individual communication, respectively, — or one would think. However, users could create a direct message and add more than one member to the conversation like a group chat! What then is the difference between the two?
There are two ways in which Slack allows users to bookmark their messages or files/items one at a time within a chat, either through starring or pinning them. However, not many users know the difference between the two functions, let alone find them to use.
Being able to upload images or files is a standard functionality in any chat app. The icon of a paper clip attached to a document and that of a landscape picture are the commonly recognised icons for attaching files and images, respectively.
However, Slack uses these icons differently. Here is a list of pain points highlighted by users along with their navigational flows.
What We Did
Taking the existing global Slack community of over 5 million users into consideration, we adopted simplification strategies as our approach to resolve the user pain points in focus.
Most of the changes came in the form of making terminologies consistent, reducing as much duplicity in existing functionalities which still proved useful for users, and reducing the levels of navigational steps required to get to the functionalities and deploy them.
We validated our prototype with several user testings and made some iterations before producing our finalised iOS Slack app prototype.
Future Enhancements
Improve user experience, and product loyalty and trust will increase. In the earlier phase, we have identified further enhancement areas which could follow, after introducing these bite-sized improvements to the Slack community. This would naturally be dependent on resource availability and user adaptability.
Learnings
Every project team had a choice of tool to use to produce the interactive prototype — Sketch, PhotoShop, InVision, Marvel, Axure, or Flinto. Flinto was the latest tool introduced to us. We were impressed by its fancy animation tricks and styles, and its collaboration with Sketch. So we decided to give it a try. What we did not expect — Flinto requires a slightly different thought process to implement the animation flow, it has no sharing link for the final prototype, and it is not a freeware.
The take-away was that we do not need any fancy, state-of-the-art tool to do prototyping. It is a means to an end. It is more important for us, as trained User Experience Designers, to communicate and convince customers and users of our design ideas, and facilitate its accurate implementation with developers in order to achieve the desired user experience that we help businesses strive to achieve for their users.
