Case Study: Slack
Breaking into the personal use market
Synopsis
Slack is a cloud-based team collaboration tool co-founded by Stewart Butterfield, Eric Costello, Cal Henderson, and Serguei Mourachov. Slack began as an internal tool used by their company, Tiny Speck, in the development of Glitch, a now defunct online game.
Our team was challenged with developing a feature for Slack that would appeal to the personal market, allowing Slack to grow its market share within the personal communication sector. Though this feature would have to still allow Slack to function as a business communication tool as well. Our team was also tasked with developing this solution within 2 weeks.
The Team
Strategy
When we first began researching we found that there where already quite a few direct competitors for Slack entering the personal market. These where: Facebook, Discord, Skype and Whatsapp. Though what we found with the competition is that the majority of them where feature heavy (Facebook messenger had a total of 28 features!). The only one that seemed to focus purely on messaging was Whatsapp and Skype.
We also completed a contextual enquiry by undertaking the on-boarding process for Slack currently and found it quite unwieldy to use. The main problems we found was that you are forced to create a team if you haven’t already been invited to one. We also found that it was impossible to join a team without an invite. Which could make it difficult if you wanted to create an open community that anyone could join. We also found that Slack itself didn’t obviously explain this to you.
Discovery & Planning
Next we conducted a series of interviews (rough 15 different users of both social media and Slack) and compiled the results into an affinity map shown below:
From the affinity mapping stage we began to see a dominant trend being displayed from the interviews and that was people want to have a clear disconnect between personal life and work life. This posed a problem to us, how can we take a work focused communication app and open it up to the personal market?
We also found a number of users found Slack to be very feature heavy and they didn’t feel confident that they knew all that Slack could actually do. They also felt very intimidated by the number of features and wouldn’t recommend it to a friend who wasn’t tech savy to use. This created another problem, how do you get the personal user on-board if it is too complicated for them to use?
With these question in mind we developed 3 primary personas for our case study.
Once we had completed our persona’s it was clear to the team that simply adding a feature to the current version of Slack would not achieve the desired goal of bringing personal users over to Slack. In fact what it might do is complicate an already complicated communication tool that personal users already found overwhelming to use.
Our solution was to create a new stand alone version of Slack that would focus on doing one thing well, and that was personal communication between friends, families and groups. It would cut back on a large amount of the features Slack has and focus on a list of core features that would put personal communication at the forefront of what it did. Due to the time constraints we focused our prototype on the on-boarding process (as we felt this was the one stage where Slack was losing a lot of its potential users).
From here we where able to develop a list of features for our first prototype:
Flow & Wireframes
Below is a our user flow showing the possible paths Rodney Danger could take to sign up for the new Slack Personal App. The ideal route would be for Rodney to sign in using the gmail account instead of going the manual option, but overall both option have almost the same path to being able to use the app fully in the shortest time possible.
From this user flow we developed our first version of the wireframes which we used to create a paper prototype.
From the paper prototype testing we found that:
- Users needed a visual guide to reassure them of where they were within the sign up stage
- The need for a confirmation screens to indicate when a section was completed
- It needed a feature to be able to remove contacts.
From the paper prototype we moved onto the hi-fi wireframes to get a bette feel of how the app would look. Next we have the screens showing the ideal user flow of how a user would go through the creating a new account on the app. The aim was to make it as quick and painless as possible by using the Sign Up with Google Account that many other apps have used.
Next we have the ideal user flow for adding friends/contacts via syncing with their Google contacts. The main aim being that it should be as easy and quick as possible for users to get into using the app.
These next screens show what would happen if a user wanted to manually add contacts to their new Slack app.
Next we have an example of the last stage of the creating a new account flow for the user. Once the user has signed up and added their contacts they have the option to go through a short tutorial explaining how the app works. This was added due to a weakness we found in the professional Slack app where a number of users didn’t know what Slack Bot was or how it could help them. This tutorial would remedy this by introducing users to Slack Bot and showcase the bot as their helpful assistant.
Final Stages
In the final stages we also developed a few additional screens for the app to show off how the messaging side of things could work with features such as, gifs, emojis and sending images. Though these where not fully implemented into the working prototype due do time constraints and so more focus was placed upon getting the on-boarding process throughly tested before presenting to the stake holders.
End Result
An easy and simple to use app that puts the focus on being able to easily sign up and communicate with friends and family in a fun and engaging manner.
Moving Forward
With the limited timeframe of 2 weeks to work on this project there where a few areas that I would personally like to explore further and refine:
- Refining the visuals of this design to make the app more visually friendly to the user
- Develop the core message features further (right now it is limited to just the on-boarding phase).
- Refining the user flow and ease of use of the app. (Still feel the process of on boarding could be sharpened a little)
- Develop a branding strategy to attract new users to the app
- Explore opportunities with how this could interact with the current Slack app for professionals
- Consider adding the features of Gmail sign up for Slack Professional.
