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Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

slack.design

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Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#31

Post by verdverm »

tombie wrote: post #5

"You have to remember you won’t satisfy everyone (or even be able to address every opinion or suggestion). It is in these moments that the importance of strong leadership and a deep commitment to the product’s core vision becomes key." - TLDR; We choose to ignore user feedback because we know better. Look I'm all for improving UX/UI but at the end of the day your users need to be 1st priority. Seems like they're stil…

I think they wrote this for themselves, since they are not listening to us

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#32

Post by rozap »

xnx wrote: post #23
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #10

Slack went downhill when they changed their logo from the hashtag to the most generic random logo they could find. I miss the days when companies would spend money and effort into good logos.

I believe their current logo is often(/best) described as "a swastika made of dicks".

There are two cardinal rules in logo design: it should not look like a dick, and it should not look like a swastika.

Somehow they did both. Kind of impressive tbh.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#33

Post by qrohlf »

> We were adding in new features like huddles, canvases, lists, and others into a UI system that was originally designed solely for messaging capabilities. Meanwhile, research showed users on the biggest and most active teams were struggling to stay on top of the basics.

"Our telemetry says that the random stuff we're bolting onto the product (like a document system (?) to go inside our chat app) is making it less usable and less good for users. So instead of listening to that feedback and telling management that our projects weren't actually helping users, we decided a better way to get promoted was to do a redesign."

> Operationalize transparency to build alignment

"We spent a bunch of money on a huge all-company onsite/whiteboarding session, then we proceeded to ignore the feedback from everyone who wasn't middle management or higher."

As a fun and instructive exercise, read through this, then read through Slack's post-Salesforce-acquisition Glassdoor reviews[1].

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Slack-Reviews-E950758.htm

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#34

Post by fhub »

I hate the redesign. However a big improvement I made was to go into the theme editor, click customize, set the "Brightness" to the third from the right and then tick the "Darker sidebars". That returns the UX to something that I find a lot easier to read at a glance.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#35

Post by geuis »

If anyone working at Slack happens to read this: You might want to shoot a message over to whoever is responsible for designing the linked page. Ask them to turn their phone to landscape mode and notice the lack of left and right padding around the text.

I'm somewhat surprised that the design blog for the company has such a glaring design problem.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#36

Post by hotnfresh »

verdverm wrote: post #31
tombie wrote: post #5

"You have to remember you won’t satisfy everyone (or even be able to address every opinion or suggestion). It is in these moments that the importance of strong leadership and a deep commitment to the product’s core vision becomes key." - TLDR; We choose to ignore user feedback because we know better. Look I'm all for improving UX/UI but at the end of the day your users need to be 1st priority. Seems like they're stil…

I think they wrote this for themselves, since they are not listening to us

The deep middle-managerese this is written in confirms it. To an audience of normal people, this reads as parody.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#37

Post by ljm »

nevinera wrote: post #20

I'm sure there's a substantial population that this redesign was successful for, but it's nobody I've talked to. I can no longer tell which of my slacks has pending messages at a glance, and my actually important channels' notifications are hidden in a sea of irrelevant ones when they used to be the only attention-attractors on the interface. I gather that you think the list of people and channels is just one aspect…

The change in the mobile app where pulling down on the channel list focuses a search box and opens the keyboard is quite jarring too, especially when that UX generally means 'get me the lastest updates'

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#38

Post by drcongo »

This re-design is a disaster in every respect. They've removed the ability to have mentions and reactions open in a sidebar, so now the messages pane stretches the full width of my enormous monitor. They've added an "Activity" thing which shows unread messages even when you're looking at the message it's telling you you haven't read. They've added a "Canvas" feature that is so useless that today the button for it turned blue with the words "Try this" because literally nobody is using it. They've added a "More..." button in the sidebar despite the fact that there's acres of empty space for those items. Huddles are the worst video calling experience available on any app, and yes, I am including Teams. I could go on and on, but Slack seriously needs to hire some good designers, I hate absolutely every aspect of having to use it now.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#39

Post by y-curious »

nevinera wrote: post #24
nevinera wrote: post #20

I'm sure there's a substantial population that this redesign was successful for, but it's nobody I've talked to. I can no longer tell which of my slacks has pending messages at a glance, and my actually important channels' notifications are hidden in a sea of irrelevant ones when they used to be the only attention-attractors on the interface. I gather that you think the list of people and channels is just one aspect…

> Operationalize transparency to build alignment Hold up there, I can't drink that fast.

What he means is that the turboencabulator rotospectrometer has reached a level of synergy unseen in 15 sigmas. The board is pleased.
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