Welcome to the Slack Design blog
We’re glad you’re here! We’re the team of researchers, writers, and designers behind Slack, and we look forward to sharing our work with you. Perhaps you’re familiar with Slack Design on Dribbble, where we’ve started posting visual pieces by our product and communication designers. With this blog, we now have the chance to share the backstory — the research, methodology, content strategy, and overall process behind our work.
One of the things we’re most delighted to share is how deeply Slack values design. As our Head of Design, Joshua Goldenberg, commented, “Design’s centrality at Slack is not something I have to fight for, to help it exist, but instead it’s a preexisting expectation I have to live up to. This is invigorating, and it’s a harder and more interesting challenge.” We’ve responded to that challenge — to live up to the priority of humane design, even as we scale — by building a strong culture of collaboration between researchers, product writers, and designers.
In practice, this ends up looking like a dance. Don’t think of a solo, performed by a single designer — think instead of a lively group dance, led by a team of researchers, designers, and writers. A researcher sets the stage, and a designer or writer kicks off the dance with a few exploratory spins. The design begins taking shape, and soon the whole team is dancing together, tapping and pivoting in time, a shuffle here and an unexpected shimmy there.
With this blog, we want to throw a spotlight on those moments. We’d like to share how a researcher, a writer, or a designer at Slack gets to kick up their heels and do what they do best, even — or especially—when their story involves a difficult compromise or a risky tradeoff. We plan to share an inside look at a wide range of projects, like shared channels, user education and onboarding, the building of Enterprise Grid, and our first user conference, Frontiers.
We’re excited to join the already rich online conversation about research and design.
And we hope you enjoy the dance.
