Unsolicited Redesign: Slack for iOS

I use Slack every day and love it. It’s a really well-made product and it’s clear that a lot of care and heart went into it. But I’m a nit-picky designer with too free much time! So here’s an unsolicited redesign that addresses my issues with navigation, notifications, and search.

Faster Navigation

Issue: Navigation on Slack for Mac is really snappy. Not so much on iOS, with the swiping and the tapping and searching. 🐢

Possible Solutions: Tabs and persistent history. 🐇

Tabs, Tabs, Tabs (To the Tune of Bills, Bills, Bills)

The tab bar is a quick and simple way to speed up navigation. Here’s one way it could be done:

Here are the benefits of this structure:

• Multitasking: When you’re going back and forth between channels and messages, you won’t lose your place.
• Previews: In each table cell, you can see a preview of the latest message. If there’s a notification, you can see the thing that notified you.

Swiper, More Swiping!

My favourite parts of Slack for Mac is being able cycle through my channel history quickly with ⌘ + [ and ⌘ + ]. This is really useful if I’m reading something and I get distracted by a notification and I want to go back to the thing I was reading.

So how can we bring this to iOS? Maybe we could do something with pagination views.

With this, we could get persistent history. Instead of having to hunt and peck for that conversation you were just reading, you can just swipe yourself over. Tapping on the back button would get you back to the root view of the tab.

Edit: A co-worker just told me that you can actually do this with a two-finger swipe. But I guess a one-finger swipe is still an improvement?

Richer Notifications

Issue: In-app notifications on the iOS app are a mystery. I get a subtle badge, but not much beyond that. That makes it hard to figure out if the company’s on fire, or if it’s nothing at all. 😓

Possible Solution: Richer notifications 💰

Toast, Delicious Toast

A possible solution: in-app notifications. They could distinguish between the four different types to give you more context, so you can prioritize accordingly:

1. Messages
2. Mentions
3. @channel or @here
4. Someone posted somewhere

And they could be easily dismissable like a toast on Android, so they wouldn’t be too overwhelming if you get a few at once. It could look something like this:

Here’s what this gets us:

• Context: You can glance at the notification to see if you need to act on it or not.
• Speed: You can tap the notification to quickly navigate to the thing. Then you can swipe to get back to where you were.

Search as a First-Class Feature

Search is one of the best features of Slack. It keeps me from bugging my coworkers about things that have been answered a million times. On the iOS app though, it can be a bit tougher for these reasons:

Issue 1: Limited real estate. I can look at a lot of results at once on desktop to find the one I want, while my mobile can only show a few. 🏠

Issue 2: Typing is slow. Writing a complex query to find exactly what I want is quick and easy on desktop. Not so much on mobile. 🙍

Issue 3: Slack produces a lot of signal, but also a lot of noise. I find it hard to keep up with stuff I’m interested in. 📣

Possible Solutions: In-line previews, structured search, and saved searches. 🔍

In-Line Previews

First off, we can move a lot of the stuff in the right drawer into the search tab as saved searches. Then we’ll steal from Inbox and show the results for each of these searches in-line, like so:

That means you can see the results from multiple queries in a single view. Nice and efficient.

Structured Search

Typing on a phone is slow and inaccurate. In trying to search for “puppies @blake,@cindy in:#random” I’d probably make twenty typos along the way.

We could make structured search easier by providing affordances around it:

In practice, it could play out like this:

This way, we can search more quickly with fewer mistakes.

Saved Searches

I like that Slack encourages transparency, but it can be overwhelming. In between chatter about what’s happening for lunch, I can easily miss reports on how well the business is doing.

One way of reducing noise is saved searches:

This gives us a few good things:

• Cut through the noise: You can keep close tabs on the things you care about. It’s customizable too, so everyone can determine what’s important for themselves.
• Encourage transparency: Since search can cut through the noise for you, it won’t discourage folks from sharing openly with the company.

Since I don’t know the constraints the Slack team works under, I probably got a lot of things wrong. The solutions that I came up with are just one of many and are likely not the best ones. But I had fun making this, so I hope you still enjoyed the post! 🙏

Thank you to Connor Cimowsky and Kyle Van Essen for reading over drafts of this post.

Published in Startups, Wanderlust, and Life Hacking

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