Redesign In Focus: Slack’s New Design Is The Perfect Re-Ordering Of ‘All Things That Matter’
Let me start with two statements. First, Slack is one of my all-time favourite tools. And second, no product is perfect. But it appears, Slack had ticked off almost all the items on my UX checklist for the tool.
A little over a couple of days ago, I received the much talked-about ‘new design’ for our workspace. I had already read about the changes and I had my notes ready! :D
For over 4 years (that’s how long I’ve been working), I have used Slack every single day (Almost). Being a designer & PM, I never found it difficult to navigate or use Slack. Almost all the time, it is like the designers were reading the user’s mind when they made it. But here’s what I think, if you know your way around and understand why things are a certain way, you’ll love this tool and use it to its full potential. On the other hand, you could also be left a little overwhelmed, if you aren’t that familiar (Such is the charm of a horizontal hierarchy).
Slack was adopted by mostly techy people in the beginning. Then mostly medium enterprises. Now, everyone uses Slack for all kinds of purposes.
Slack’s Article on their Official blog also confirms this. The key focus has been on making a Slack for everyone. This version is more of putting things in place — or rather the right place for both beginners and power users. Let’s have a look at a few things that changed.
Search Everything
If you look at the old design of a channel/conversation in Slack, you’d see the channel details are followed by a search bar and a bunch of other options in the top navbar. For a very long time, I thought this search is local or it’s going to start with a filter for searching within the channel (If my memory serves me right, this was tested for a brief while). However, this search turned out to be a universal one. It returns results across messages, files, people, and channels. While there is no harm in keeping it there in the initial stages but, as the workspaces get bigger, user behaviour is likely to change towards search.
This simple re-ordering and moving the search to the top navbar clearly conveys the universal nature of the Search. Also, this eliminated the need for Jump which was placed in the sidebar for searching and switching between conversations. The fav shortcut Cmd + K still works though.
Where did the new sidebar items come from?
Well, speaking of the old cluttered top nav, remember the bunch of options after the search bar I was talking about earlier?
Well, look closely, Activity, Saved (Formerly Starred), People (Which is much more human way of calling out Workspace Directory), Channel Browser (We’ll get to this in a while), and Files comprise the sidebar.
Wait! Files? Yes, many users don’t realize Slack has a repository of all the files you’ve shared in conversations/channels. In fact, ever since they introduced the feature to have a capsule for yourself (You), Slack has pretty much become a drive. The new file browser puts it at the centre helping users easily retrieve the files shared.
As I was mentioning earlier, all these options are universal/global and putting them on the Top Nav didn’t really make them seem so. Also, options like Directory and Files were hidden inside the overflow menu making them almost hidden.
Channel Browsing
I had observed quite a few new users onboarding Slack. Do you know when they used to struggle the most? When I ask them to join a channel. Almost always they go click the ‘+’ right next to Channels. Well, I did the same the first time too. The ‘+’ is to create a new channel and the click on Channels is for browsing of channels.
In many Workspaces (from personal experience), users create Public channels and leave them for discoverability. Since browsing wasn’t very straight forward, such channels almost don’t flourish with activity. The new submenu for the ‘+’ along with the Channel browser puts channels at the heart of any workspace.
Floating conversations?
Personally, at times, this was the most annoying thing with Slack. Introduction of ‘Drafts’ solved this little problem of mine. Allow me to explain:
As you can see, Slack has a pretty long-running sidebar. If your team is big, it’s gonna get little difficult finding things, especially when you’re writing something to a colleague and you move away from the conversation.
When you do so, You’ll notice that the conversation is moved under a menu called ‘Drafts’, which only appears when there is a draft and sits above channels.
This I felt was not intuitive and if you’re used to the ‘Cmd+K’ shortcut, almost always you’ll use this to find the conversation.
A new Compose Button
Personally, I am glad to see a Compose Button.
It all boils down to a simple preference — Do you write the message and decide the recipients? or you decide the recipients and then write the message.
There are a lot of people who do this and that and hence this change makes a lot of sense.
Among the many changes introduced, one very insignificant change caught my eye — The width of the sidebar. I’ll be very curious to know what sort of experiments were done before finalizing this width.
How does that make a difference? — Well, it doesn’t bring about a lot of change but for users who have used the older versions, there’ll be inertia on where the compose box (for typing) starts and it’ll need a bit of adjusting before they’d get used to it.
A bit of side story
In late 2018, I was working on a project for my current organisation. It was a KMS (Knowledge Management System) for teams, which could bring all the scattered knowledge across emails, files, conversations, to-do lists etc. together. Most of our preliminary ideas and the prototypes have many elements this redesign validates.
I’ll leave a glimpse here for you.
What could be in store for the future…
Slack wants you to break out of the inbox. While it might not have completely replaced email, but it surely has become the go-to communication app for teams. It brings teams together effectively, efficiently and painlessly. However, during our discussions at NerdVolume, we did feel there is room for improvement in one aspect.
I think threads need to be improved significantly. Like we should be able to add subject to a thread or open in a new page.
— Abhay Kumar
I do agree with this. Let me break it down. Imagine you’re sending a design of a single screen for a review via email. First, you added your team, and let’s say the PM. Then after a couple of discussions, you bring in the Tech Lead, who in turn adds a couple of developers to the thread. And, after a long discussion, you’ll add the boss to the thread and propose the change. Well, all this happens in a thread where it has a set purpose/objective and anybody can be looped into it at any point in time.
However, to do the same on slack, you’ll have to either create a channel or identify all the stakeholders and then create a conversation. Creating a channel is no big deal, but it still isn’t as simple as looping someone into an email.
This is where the threads could come into the picture. Today, the channels have a purpose. But what if a set of messages could have a purpose? What if they could exist outside a conversation or a channel? Here’s a concept. Do let me know your thoughts on this in the comments.
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