Low friction, high delight on-boarding via Slack
There are so many cool people doing cool things with the Slack API at the moment and we wanted to share something that we have been working on…
One of the many things you have to solve when building a digital product is how users are going to signup, download and login to your application especially if you have multiple apps in your product family. While we could have done something generic, we wanted to consider every aspect of our product and make it truly great to use. We wanted user on-boarding that was simple, low-friction and ‘high-delight’.
When we started building our first prototype we just implemented a plain and simple login with Twitter. Early beta testers downloaded the app, hit the login button, and that was it.
But based on user feedback and our own usage of Slack we became more and more interested about integrating Context with Slack. We started to write down the many opportunities and then iterate. Obvious ones like user notifications, and more interesting ideas like implementing a “Sign in via Slack” button… But, wait a minute, what does this button actually do?
The “Sign up via Slack” button gives you more power than a good old “Sign in via” button, it’s a sign up button on steroids. The Slack API gives you access to every user in the team and it can be very powerful, this is what we’ve done…
- A Slack admin user can sign into Context via Slack and create or allocate Context to a channel.
- Every Slack user in that channel automatically receives an email with our Magic Links where they can download our iOS and Mac apps and then also be signed into Context.
- We want our users to be able to focus on getting, and giving, great design feedback and critique. If you add or remove a user to your Context Slack channel, they are automatically added or removed from Context — you can also have multiple channels synched with Context. We think this is perfect if you have projects under a confidentiality agreement.
What did we learn?
Well, we feel very confident that teams can really benefit from this use case of the Slack API. We’ve seen a lot of cool features implemented around this area, things like importing emails from your Slack team and some cool bots.
However, we couldn’t find a simple way of team on-boarding, we are sure that it’s just a matter of time because this implementation becomes more widespread as it is not as hard as it might seem.
Background: Our product, Context, is all about getting designers the best possible feedback on their work by using visual markers and voice clips — whatever tools they are using, wherever they are in the design process.
We have an iOS app for taking photos of sketches and a Mac app for taking screen shots of digital designs.
If you would like to give this on-boarding process a go, please sign up to the beta for Context
Or if you would like to learn more about our implementation you can email us here
And obviously, big thanks to Daniel Kolodziej, Multicolour and Zach Inglis. All of this wouldn’t have been possible without them.
