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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

#41

Post by dkyc »

EMM_386 wrote: post #30

I realize that Slack is more complex then it appears, and able to do more things then it may seem. But by looking at those whiteboards and reading parts of the description, the amount of effort, people and time involved in a redesign was just a bit more than I was expecting. Looking at the images of the resulting whiteboards alone had me wondering "what could all of this possibly be about?". Details within details ab…

If they hadn't spent so much time, you would have noticed. That's the point.

Adding features and capabilities to a without making it more complicated for users who only use a fraction of them ("chat and huddle app"), is part of why this is so complicated.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#42

Post by Sesse__ »

doubled112 wrote: post #19
Thev00d00 wrote: post #6

Please stop making every update require more screen space. Every time, more chrome, bigger fonts, more padding, more views that take over the whole viewport.

I do miss the density of something like mIRC way back when. I guess when everybody had an 800x600 screen we had to make the most of them. Maybe they could bring back the IRC bridge.

You can use wee-slack if you wish. It has an active maintainer and a fairly large user base.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#43

Post by bink »

doubled112 wrote: post #19
Thev00d00 wrote: post #6

Please stop making every update require more screen space. Every time, more chrome, bigger fonts, more padding, more views that take over the whole viewport.

I do miss the density of something like mIRC way back when. I guess when everybody had an 800x600 screen we had to make the most of them. Maybe they could bring back the IRC bridge.

> Maybe they could bring back the IRC bridge.

I think that could only happen if IRC added support for threading.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#45

Post by enra »

Thev00d00 wrote: post #6

Please stop making every update require more screen space. Every time, more chrome, bigger fonts, more padding, more views that take over the whole viewport.

The other side here is that when I've designed apps that more dense, smaller font sizes and UI, people do then complain things are too small.

Engineers are generally ok and appreciate density but more mainstream users often don't.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#46

Post by hotnfresh »

finnjohnsen2 wrote: post #14

Slack, please! Stop making features. You're bloating your product. It was fine, don't add more things I don't need.

They're probably chasing Teams, where it's more of a platform for all your stuff than a chat app. You can edit word documents in Teams, for god's sake. MS project management tickets open directly in Teams if you click a link. Meetings scheduled over email generate Teams private chats with all the people in them (this is a cool feature but is backwards of what would be ideal, but that's another topic) and all kinds of other automatic stuff—if you use enough other MS shit.

And, notably, it's really bad at being a chat app, which is probably where Slack is headed if they keep going.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#47

Post by pesfandiar »

"Get your employees addicted to work notifications" seems to be one of their core premises, and this redesign is yet another step in that direction.

The biggest issue of this redesign for me was getting rid of the "unread message badge" both on the desktop app icon and the browser tab. They used to have a badge with numbers for missed notifications (e.g. direct messages) and one (empty circle) for unread messages, but now a missed direct message and the 100th message on an HR channel thread show the same badge.

I found that Slack was nagging for more of my attention after the redesign (gotta get those engagement numbers up!). I ended up using a Chrome extension (Tab Modifier) to hide the Slack tab's badges.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#49

Post by igetspam »

ljm wrote: post #37
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'

Holy insufferable change, Batman! Why?????

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#50

Post by swiftcoder »

I had managed not to use Slack for ~5 years, and unfortunately I come back to it just in time for this... atrocious mess.

5 years ago Slack was a very focussed chat tool, and it rang rings around the other solutions available at the time (our company was heavily invested in Skype for Business, aka Microsoft Lync, aka Microsoft Communicator).

Now it's a confusing forest of duelling messaging paradigms. Is the message I'm looking for in Connections or DMs? Is the channel in Connections or in Channels? Maybe it's in Threads? I know, I'll check the Activity panel, which doesn't know how threads work...

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