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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

#71

Post by dylan604 »

hotnfresh wrote: post #11
billoday wrote: post #8

A redesign that is universally hated in my organization. Every standup has someone complaining about it.

Personally, I've disliked just about every change they made after initially adding message threads (that was a good change). It's all been downhill since, making it harder to use and harder to find things (though I've not used this latest redesign, as I'm no longer at a place that uses Slack)

>as I'm no longer at a place that uses Slack

whoa! is this as heavenly as it sounds, or does it just mean you're using Teams?

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#72

Post by hotnfresh »

dylan604 wrote: post #71
hotnfresh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I've disliked just about every change they made after initially adding message threads (that was a good change). It's all been downhill since, making it harder to use and harder to find things (though I've not used this latest redesign, as I'm no longer at a place that uses Slack)

>as I'm no longer at a place that uses Slack whoa! is this as heavenly as it sounds, or does it just mean you're using Teams?

Teams. So, yeah, out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#73

Post by ChrisArchitect »

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.

was wondering what was up with the title when I read it .... On their end, would have even gone as far to drop the yet..... How Our Biggest Redesign Came To Be

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#74

Post by e63f67dd-065b »

> However, redesigns usually fall into the “high effort, high variance, questionable benefit” bucket that businesses try to avoid at all costs. Unless something is absolutely broken, not many companies are willing to invest.

I have no idea what kind of feedback they received, but Slack was not absolutely broken; it was not great, and the redesign made it worse, not better. If you already know that redesigns should be avoided at all costs, why did you still do it?

Also as a sidenote Slack's notification system is still hopelessly broken; I will regularly respond to a DM on my phone, get back to my laptop, click on a notification, only for it to bring me right back to the message I literally just responded to on my phone!

Discord handles this beautifully, the moment I look at a message on my phone it's marked as read on the desktop client. I can't believe a feature as core as notifications in a chat app can be this broken compared to Discord's beautiful implementation.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#75

Post by mmh0000 »

arnvidr wrote: post #68
bink wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe they could bring back the IRC bridge. I think that could only happen if IRC added support for threading.

I would be more than happy if threading was completely removed from the app

I'm on the opposite side of that argument. I love threading.

It allows me to easily have multiple different conversations in the same channel at the same time.

And, if I need to, in the future, share that conversation with someone, I can link them directly to that one thread.

What would I do otherwise, when I needed a team mate to get up-to speed on a convo that happened months ago... Hey go back to August 8th at 1PM and read everything while filtering out all the things that aren't relavent? Crazy talk!

Edit: I will say for this to work, a higher up at your company needs to slap people when they don't use threads. In my org. our CTO is very good about reminding people to use threads.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#76

Post by ashton314 »

dylan604 wrote: post #70
ashton314 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cmd+Shift+s pops all the workspaces in the side bar like before the redesign. This is a new change after—I am sure—many many people complained about that very thing. Such a stupid change. Just show me the workspaces by default gosh darnit.

Cmd+Shift+s in what browser? In FF, it doesn't do what you describe

I'm using the app on macOS; idk how to do that in Firefox

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#77

Post by dylan604 »

ashton314 wrote: post #76
dylan604 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cmd+Shift+s in what browser? In FF, it doesn't do what you describe

I'm using the app on macOS; idk how to do that in Firefox

The Cmd+ kind of gave away your use of macOS. That's how I was able to do the same thing using FF on my MBP. Kind of on obvious oversight on your dismissive non-answer to the question of "what browser"? Assuming Safari at this point, but you could be a Chrome user, so I'm still asking the same question.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#78

Post by karmakaze »

I immediately noticed how slow it was. It was confirmed when I resized the window. Moving the corner around in a circle has the contents refreshing and lagging at maybe 2fps.

Then I had to dig around and figure out how to de-WindowsVista-ize the theme: disable transparency and gradients, then used "Surprise me" for the theme colors until I got something not-too-loud.

Re: Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be

#80

Post by anuraaga »

legitster wrote: post #63
city41 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Before Slack I was a big "Inbox Zero" kind of guy. But Slack is such a noisy product that it has essentially trained me to ignore alerts. I like that DMs are pulled out from channel activity. But "Home" for me is such a hot mess of hundreds of channels with no easy way to discern important things from noise.

The activity tab not defaulting to unread-only is the most perplexing design in history. Given that the setting is per workspace, you end up switching so many times to avoid a persistent white dot that you just start hating that tab. Ignoring it is an option but "Inbox Zero" type of guys like us just can't I think.

It really feels like the intended usage is to ignore white dots and focus on red, but then we really need a setting to remove all white dots who really can't proceed to real work until they're gone.

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