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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

#51

Post by Atrine »

> We kicked off the project in earnest with a three-day in-person onsite for design, engineering, product and program leads. With the prototype as our guide, we started to sketch out the path to production. Which teams would need to be involved? How quickly could we move? When might we start bringing customers into the process? Which questions were most important to answer first?

"When might we start bringing customers into the process?" Seems like this should be much earlier in the process, no? Sure relying on automated metrics to help guide your process was part of the path, but if you aren't really talking with customers and figuring out what your needs are, your designs are going to be more biased towards how Slack operates and the culture of Slack.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#53

Post by Atrine »

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…

> I'm sure there's a substantial population that this redesign was successful for, but it's nobody I've talked to.

I think the measurement of success in this case has less to do with the customer's feelings about the product and more about people understanding and using the full feature set of Slack. All the new features they've been adding in just kind of floated by and we never used them. Either they were embedded in the middle of a series of steps we already had habits around (so we just ignored them) or they were so subtle that we didn't see the point in trying them out.

In other words, the problem they were really trying to solve was around scaling the product with all the features they had. That's likely where measurement of success will take place.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#54

Post by AlotOfReading »

pesfandiar wrote: post #47

"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, bu…

They also made a fairly subtle change to what the "new messages" status actually means. Previously, it meant you hadn't clicked on a channel yet. The status would clear as soon as the action was taken, even before the network requests to load the channel were finished. This meant you could go through and clear dozens of channels pretty quickly without reading them.

Now, that status is only cleared after the client fully reloads the channel, which can take multiple seconds (yay, modern software). As someone with dozens of channels I don't read and can't organize, it's very tedious to clear them so I can focus on the channels I actually care about.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#55

Post by AndrewOMartin »

arketyp wrote: post #9
kaycebasques wrote: post #2

> Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be HN does this thing where it automatically strips out "how" from titles, presumably because someone once decided that the "how" is unnecessary or clickbait. The original title here is "Slack: How our..." The most interesting thing for me is that this error-prone moderation rule has made me realize how linguistically load-bearing the word "how" is in many sentences.

Does simply stripping out the word ever work?

Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#56

Post by city41 »

legitster wrote: post #27

Confession time: I was never a real big fan of Slack's UI before. All channels and conversations being in the same pane just made everything so noisy. But now it's pretty atrocious. The Activity tab is uselessly cluttered. If someone is trying to get my attention in a thread and it's not a DM, I rarely ever see or notice it.

Maybe we just use Slack differently, but I find just staying in Home largely mimics the old interface. Enough so that I don't really mind this redesign. Anything that pops me out of Home is jarring and unwelcome.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#57

Post by johannes1234321 »

dbg31415 wrote: post #7

The redesign is OK. Annoying how some things moved, still not enough emphasis on channels that have unread messages (light text vs. normal for “bold” to call attention), and still no way to mute all but direct @ messages… so you can’t ever mute @channel or @here without muting the channel. The way Slack handles and automatically closes direct messages and private chats is annoying and I want to be able to turn that o…

Besides staring you can group them in named sections. I have a section with "frequent DMs" and they stay available without auto closing. Works okayish for me.

According to https://slack.com/resources/using-slack/how-to-organize-your... that seems paid-only feature

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#58

Post by city41 »

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.

I do question how wise it is for such an essential tool (I am in Slack all day, every day, all the time at work) to be driven by profit. I've always expected the choices Slack has made were because their tests and metrics show they are profitable. I even have a small script I run that hacks the JS source code to remove a feature that infuriates me.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#59

Post by city41 »

pesfandiar wrote: post #47

"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, bu…

At least on Linux they've never allowed turning off the "blue dot" notification. Thankfully people figured out how to turn it off by hacking the JS code:

https://superuser.com/questions/1211975/slack-app-on-linux-h...

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#60

Post by mcjiggerlog »

city41 wrote: post #56
legitster wrote: post #27

Confession time: I was never a real big fan of Slack's UI before. All channels and conversations being in the same pane just made everything so noisy. But now it's pretty atrocious. The Activity tab is uselessly cluttered. If someone is trying to get my attention in a thread and it's not a DM, I rarely ever see or notice it.

Maybe we just use Slack differently, but I find just staying in Home largely mimics the old interface. Enough so that I don't really mind this redesign. Anything that pops me out of Home is jarring and unwelcome.

Not just you - if you never leave Home then basically works exactly the same as it ever has. I don't mind it at all, and can understand how for massive companies it makes things a little more manageable.
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