How Slack blends productivity and delight
At Slack, we’re committed to making people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.
It’s safe to say most enterprise tools aim to improve productivity. That’s often the goal and the promise of shiny new enterprise products. When you think about work software, you often think about what those tools enable you to do, such as manage information, store data, track issues, share updates, and whatever else you need to do to get your job done. These are the things and tasks that ultimately enable you to be more productive and better at your job.
Social products serve a different purpose but in similar ways — they might help us manage people and events, store memories, track current affairs, update your family and friends, and whatever else you need to do to feel connected to loved ones. With that said, one main difference between enterprise and social products is that the former is usually something you’re required to use, while the latter competes for your time by providing a functional and delightful experience.
We conducted a survey to explore the words that people currently use to describe work tools. The words that came to mind most frequently for survey responders were “professional,” “clean” and “efficient,” while words like “pleasant” were less common.
When you compare with the same question asked of the same people but of consumer products, you see something different:
Words like “fun,” “engaging,” and “enjoyable” are now more prominent.
There are inherent differences between enterprise tools and consumer products; while enterprise products promise to foster productivity, consumer products aim to delight. But we think bringing more delight into work tools can go a long way in not only building a product that you choose to use and that delights you, but also one that will increase your productivity.
I’m going to share some principles we think about at Slack and how we take a lot of cues from consumer products. This, in turn, inspires us to build a product that makes people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.
Principle 1: Put people, not features, first.
We’ve heard this before. Human-centered design isn’t exactly a new concept. But for enterprise tools where the goal is to foster productivity, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the features the tool provides, without thinking deeply about the experiences it enables.
Listening to your customers is step one, and building a direct line of communication between you and your customers is a must. But simply responding to feature requests isn’t enough — it can sometimes lead to unsolved problems and unmet needs. To solve the real problems people face, we need to first observe and understand their workflows and daily challenges.
One of my favorite consumer stories to illustrate this point is from Netflix. They shared some really fascinating research about the work that’s gone into perfecting their recommendation engine. They discovered that the ratings people give are aspirational rather than reflecting of daily activity: many people tell them they often watch foreign movies or documentaries, but in practice that doesn’t happen very much.
While this isn’t about work, I think the idea translates well. Asking people what they want is important, but it doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story. This is why it’s also important to observe what they do.
At Slack we think about this all the time. We’re lucky to have a really strong line of communication with our customers. They tweet at us and write in to us, and our stellar Customer Experience team takes pride in addressing and acknowledging everyone who reaches out. We take each inquiry and request seriously. What makes user research different is that we look beyond what people ask for and we collect data to understand what’s underlying that request.
For example, we found that people wanted a way to easily integrate with Google Docs. When you think about building a feature to address that request, it’s quite straightforward, technical challenges aside.
As you can see in the picture, enabling people to share docs in Slack didn’t completely solve the problem. People were sharing docs and forgetting to open up permissions, which prevented collaboration from the start. We gave people what they asked for, but their underlying need wasn’t met.
After we took into account their need to share docs in order to provide feedback and share comments, we were able to anticipate potential problems before they occurred. That additional understanding inspired us to train Slackbot to intervene — after noticing the file isn’t viewable to the person it was just shared with, Slackbot prompts you to fix it inline, before it actually becomes a problem.
Putting people first doesn’t just mean checking off each feature request that comes in. It means taking the time to understand the need behind each request, in order to build more pleasant solutions.
Principle 2: Bring humanity into the product.
One of the top concerns we hear is the worry that tools are impersonal and that written communication will be misinterpreted. In fact, in a recent study we ran of 3000+ office workers from different industries in the US, one out of every four people were concerned that written communication would lead to miscommunication. In the same study, 60% of the participants expressed their preference for in-person communication above email, phone, and video.
When you talk to people about this, it makes sense. As companies have become more distributed and people have started using more tools, we’ve lost some of the ability and opportunity to pick up on human cues, such as body language and physical presence. For example, if your entire company worked in the same room together, you’d know if someone was out of town because you wouldn’t see them at the office all week. You might also know if someone was having a bad day, because you’d see it in their face or hear it in their voice. If someone was on the phone or in a meeting room, you likely wouldn’t try to start a conversation with them at that moment.
These cues might seem obvious, but they are strong signals that are often lost when you move from working in the same physical space to working through a virtual tool. We spend a lot of time thinking about how we can build these human cues and connections into our product, and there’s much we can learn from social products, too. Here are some examples:
Emotional cues help us understand how someone is feeling and if they’re happy or sad.
Imagine if you told your boss you were going to be late on a deadline, and she responded with “OK.” Would it be clear to you how she felt? If she responded in person, you might rely on her intonation or a facial expression.
We can borrow from social communications here, and use emoji to help convey emotions.
Imagine that her response included this emoji. It’s much clearer how she feels.
Emoji introduce color, clarity, and fun, but they also reduce ambiguity and miscommunication — which leads to increased productivity.
Physical presence is also hard to detect online. So we’ve introduced the custom status feature to help people understand what you’re doing at the moment. Messaging tools can sometimes set unrealistic expectations that lead people to believe you are always on or always accessible.
Custom status helps you set better expectations for your teammates by clearly signaling when you’re on vacation, in a meeting, or otherwise occupied.
Finally, building personal relationships is really important in establishing trust and camaraderie, and something that you often associate with happening “at the watercooler.” One way we’ve enabled this at Slack is through community channels, which give you a way to connect with coworkers around shared interests and topics. This helps you connect with people you may have never otherwise met, and gives you the opportunity to build meaningful relationships.
Understanding the underlying concerns — that written communication will be misinterpreted and tools are impersonal — has clarified for us the importance of building social cues and dynamics into our product, in order to build a more pleasant and productive experience.
Principle 3: Delight matters.
What does it mean to mix delight with work? When I talk about delight, I’m talking about delight in the actual job, in the day-to-day tasks and work that you’re doing. By making jobs easier and by removing unnecessary hurdles and steps, we are delighting people and increasing productivity at the same time. Let me give you an example to illustrate how we think about this at Slack.
Picture this: You email a file to your team and ask for feedback. Each email response could vary drastically and include any of the following (and more):
- People who reply-all to provide a status update — they got it, they are reading it, or they will read it later.
- People who reply-all to share their feedback.
- People who reply just to you to share their feedback.
- People who reply to you and a couple other people to share their feedback.
- People who think others should be added to the conversation, so they add more people to the email.
In the end, you have potentially received tens (or hundreds!) of replies. But without going through each one, it’s difficult to figure out who actually provided feedback or what that feedback is. Plus, everyone included on the thread now has many emails they likely don’t need to read at all. Without looking at each one, though, it’s hard to tell if there’s something essential or not. Every person involved ends up having little control over their inbox.
We’ve seen people use Slack for the same use case — only this time people share the file in a channel.
People can use the “eyes emoji” to indicate they saw it and are looking at it, and they can use the “check mark emoji” to indicate they’ve looked and provided feedback. It organizes those responses together in the context of the shared file, so you can easily track each action. Other people can add someone to the channel or share the file in an additional channel, and it won’t cause additional disruption to anyone.
Using emoji in consumer products is common, where delighting users is a valued goal. With Slack, emoji bring delight, too — not just from the fun of perfectly expressing a thought or feeling, like with social tools, but also from the organization, improved process, and increased efficiency that result.
Taken together, we can see that productivity doesn’t have to come at the cost of delighting users. Rather, it’s productive because it’s delightful, and it’s delightful because it’s productive.
It’s common to hear people say that communication tools often lead to miscommunication, that chatting with someone over a messaging service is never quite as good as meeting with them face-to-face, and that sharing a document is always easier when you’re in the same room.
But work is changing. Companies are becoming more distributed and remote work is becoming more common. Not everyone has the luxury of meeting face-to-face, much less the ability to connect with remote coworkers.
We need to shift the conversation away from thinking of tools as the problem, because tools have to be the solution as well. Not only the solution to the obvious communication challenges we face every day as humans, but also to the not-so-obvious challenges that come with working with distributed coworkers.
I hope these principles have inspired you to think about bringing humanity and delight into the tools we use. We believe that by putting people first, bringing humanity into the product, and focusing on delight, tools have the ability to actually bring people closer together, and to make work simpler, more pleasant, more productive, and more fun.
