Does your Slack ever look like this?

Slack Struggles with Big Teams

So I tried to design a solution for it

As a design lead turned startup founder, there aren’t many things I’m more concerned with than solving problems people have. So, because I keep encountering this frustrating issue with Slack, I decided to take a stab at solving what I believe to be one of Slack’s biggest product problems — handling information overload with teams at scale.

That and I also need more content marketing material to promote my startup.

Introducing..

The User’s Job to be Done

When I’ve been away from Slack, I need to catch up on the relevant information that concerns me quickly so that I have the necessary context to do my job.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Slack as a product. There are many aspects of it that leave its competitors in the dust, but this gripe with a core use case often cripples the experience for me — and knowing that they’re looking to push into enterprise, I see this as a huge obstacle. Big teams means lots of information.

A screenshot from my time as a design lead, after being in a meeting and returning to my desk.

The pitfalls of chat collaboration are already evident — people being unable to turn off, things getting lost in the fold, you name it. But what’s even worse is when we do turn off or leave for a period of time and the disaster that ensues once we return.

And so, the biggest user problems are:

1. Too much noise to signal. Urgency of mentions is ambiguous. Can’t tell whether some are very important, or less so.
2. Critical information is not persistent. After reading them the mention disappears and it’s hard to refer back to the ones you need to act on.

Let me paint a few scenarios.

You’ve come back from a meeting, vacation or sick day, and there are way too many messages and mentions. Which are important? Which need to be addressed now or can be left for later? Do they all need to be addressed? The whole thing causes anxiety when you’re off and a headache when you’re on.

User Problem 1 — Too much noise to signal.

• You’ll get a lot of @channel or @group messages that are irrelevant to you, but you can’t leave or mute the channel in fear that the one out of 5 mentions is actually critically relevant.
• What is relevant is different to each person because of roles & projects, and those change frequently.
• People will @mention you in slack but it’s mid-stream in a conversation and you have no context.
• If you want to read old messages in Slack, you have to scroll and read it in reverse (bottom to top).
• You can email, but it’s cluttered with external and promotional things.

User Problem 2 — Critical information is not persistent

• I’ll check my mentions, note that there are 5 things I need to re-address later, but since the mentions disappear I can no longer find them.
• Starring is the feature solution, but it’s a reactive approach, not a proactive one (proactive meaning I show up and what’s important is already displayed, vs me having to comb through noise to star the ones that are important.)
• I find myself re-marking each important message as unread to get context later.

Caveats

To be fair, most of these problems are anecdotal from a single point of observation: myself. I don’t have any behavioural or attitudinal quant data surrounding the problem, so I’m making some assumptions about statistically significant behaviour.

But hey, sometimes it’s fun to throw away the rules and just design based on unvalidated intuition.

At the very least it’ll make for a good old-fashioned unproductive red-in-the-face bikeshedding.

It’s difficult to guess at the business problem when you don’t work there, but here again are my anecdotes.

• 3 teams I’ve worked with have used Slack.
• 20–30% of each team cohort has these problems at a high frequency (daily).
• 1 team that grew > 80 headcount churned.
• Only 3 data points, but if extrapolated, given Slack’s aim to penetrate the enterprise market could be a big blow to product adoption & retention.

Slack Inboxes!

It may be ironic to call it precisely what Slack tried to replace (the email inbox), but there’s something to be said about why email has lasted as a technology for so long. It’s personalized. You curate via subscriber lists. Gmail sorts things via algorithm. It may not do a good job of it, but not executing well doesn’t mean the design isn’t strong. So I’m voting to bring it back.. inside Slack.

Let me walk you through the journey.

1. Chris, a designer, just finished a 24 hour strategy meeting where they discussed the merit of dog emojis.
2. He returns to his desk, sits down, and wakes his computer.

Information Hierarchy-wise, top of the list. When you’ve been away and need to catch up you start here.

3. The first thing he sees is 7 red mentions at the very top of Slack under #important.

4. He clicks #important as he only has 5 minutes before his next meeting.

“Important” is different for everyone. For me, messages from my boss, all mentions from specific channels, and mentions from specific people in specific channels could all be “Important”.

5. He skims them and knows he needs to address them later. The messages include:

• One direct message from his boss
• 1 mention from the product manager in #product-launch, a starred channel of Chris’s (only the PM’s mentions are important to Chris apparently, not the developers’)
• 2 mentions from 2 members of Chris’s product team who mentioned him inside the #office-lunch channel (mentions from people who are not part of Chris’s current product team don’t appear here.)

6. After his next meeting, Chris comes back and feels he now needs to add a few more people to his #important inbox.

7. He edits his #important inbox criteria, and adds Direct Messages from the PM he’s working on for this next project, Jordan. Now all DMs from Jordan will also appear here.

Hover to edit, just like editing topics. Should be easy to swap criteria and filters on a whim. E.g., if one project wraps up, you can remove mentions from that project channel from this inbox.

8. Chris can now come back and always hit the most important topics first, while addressing the non-essential ones later on (if at all). He can also be a part of many channels without having to actually read all of them as the most important things will be distilled for him in his inbox.

9. Chris is happy and can now sleep soundly at night without checking Slack in his dreams.

Therefore, the solution is:

1. A flexible way to partition incoming messages based on degree of relevance. Everyone has different versions of what’s relevant because of roles. So it makes sense that everyone has their own personalized setup.
2. Easy to set up & change. Situations which cause messages to be relevant also change frequently. Some may find some messages more/less relevant based on when. E.g. when you’re coming back from vacation, #fun messages may be less relevant. But what is #fun to you may also not be #fun to others.

Admittedly, this solution has not been tested, not has it even been prototyped or refined by the additions of other design-minded individuals with context.

However, if I were to ship this, as some first thoughts I’d likely measure:

1. User problem: Noise to signal, critical info not persistent

• How frequently do people use #important?
• How frequently do people change their inbox criteria? Reflecting the fluid nature of work.
• How frequently do people click #important even when nothing has changed?
• Do people create their own inboxes with specific criteria?

2. Biz problem: Customer churn with larger teams

• Has retention of larger teams improved?
• Has the sales team had an easier time converting free to paid specifically for larger teams?

Thought experiments like these are always fun. There’s no harm in being wrong (and I’m sure I am to some degree), and at best it can prompt some serendipitous inspiration of a better idea from someone else. Hopefully you found this interesting, sound off in the comments below for critical discussion around the problem/solution!

Have a startup idea? I’m building a product where people can test their ideas before sinking thousands of dollars into building them. If you want an affordable way to test ideas, ask a question on Scoops here! For $12 you can ask a question to 100 people, and then follow-up with people who respond a certain way.