We ❤️ Slack Interactive Message Buttons!
Slack recently released an update to their Slack API with a much anticipated feature of interactive messages.
As soon as it was released, Mark McEahern jumped at the chance to improve the following aspects of our checklist Slack App.
- Better help
- Completing steps (Checklists!)
- Responding to syntax errors
- Adding comments to steps
Better Help
Before buttons, when you asked for help, well we gave you a big ol’ list of possible commands. It was Way Too Long™.
Now, we give you a nice, kind overview of the 4 main commands to get started using checklists.
And then we use buttons to let you see detailed commands. In general, the help related to all the ways to interact with your Manifestly checklists has been greatly improved. Check out our updated help, with buttons!
If you click the button to see examples of the runs command, you’ll see:
In this context buttons helped us provide more simple initial help with progressively more detailed help.
Completing Steps
This is the main use case for Manifestly. In the Old Way, completing checklist steps required the user to list steps and then type a specific command to complete a step. So Much Work!
Now, with Interactive Message Buttons (The New Way™), you can simply click the button for the step you want to complete.
Responding to Syntax Errors
Old
New
Adding Comments to Steps!
Unlike a simple todo list, there are more things you can do with a checklist step such as assign it, add a comment, and even skip it.
In the old version before buttons, you needed to understand a bunch of commands.
But NOW, it’s super easy.
Hiding Complexity
In general, the new Slack Message Buttons have helped us hide complexity from our users — and this is one of the main goals of writing software, to make things easier for people
So, thanks Slack, for helping us help checklist users around the world. We’re looking forward to making the Manifestly Slack app even better.
