When Tamar Yehoshua started a new job in early 2019, she faced a challenge: she’d never used Slack, and her new coworkers lived in it.
As she got up to speed, colleagues helpfully steered her through the parts of the workplace collaboration service that were less than intuitive. “I don’t think I would have gotten as good at using Slack if I didn’t have people next to me telling me, ‘Oh, you should try this setting, you should use this feature over here,'” she remembers.
Unlike most Slack newbies who feel a tad disoriented, Yehoshua was in a position to do something beyond patiently puzzling it out. A Google and Amazon veteran, she was acclimating herself to Slack because she had joined the company as its chief product officer. And Slack knew that it had a lot of users like Yehoshua—folks who would be more productive in the service once they understood everything that it could do.
Now Slack is rolling out a new version designed with approachability in mind. The redesign doesn’t introduce any daring new features or take the service into uncharted territory. Instead, it’s mostly about organizing what’s already there and implementing a multitude of tweaks that make the environment more comprehensible and pleasant.
Tamar Yehoshua, SlackWe want to make sure that we give the best experience we can for all these people who are in really difficult situations.”
Slack being Slack, the people responsible for the redesign created it by collaborating in their own service, sometimes trying working prototypes of changes on for size. And for the first time, they created shared channels and invited in real customers to help shape the new version. Around 100 members of the company’s Champion Network—an advisory board of savvy users—participated in one such channel. Since helping Slack neophytes was a primary goal, a separate group of about 60 less expert users had their say in another shared channel.
As Slack was getting ready to release its redesign, the coronavirus pandemic brought unexpected urgency to its simplification goals. According to Yehoshua, the company has seen a bump in inquiries from organizations that are new to Slack and have suddenly found themselves telling their workforces to work from home. “We want to make sure that we give the best experience we can for all these people who are in really difficult situations trying to figure out how to stay productive,” she says.
With that in mind, Slack revised its plans to slowly roll out the redesigned service and will instead start all new teams on it as quickly as possible. Existing teams will get the update more gradually over the next few weeks. Mobile versions—similar in spirit to the new desktop incarnation, but not carbon copies—will follow.
Time-dilation of the last 10 days has been bonkers. No playbooks & constant rapid change means a lot of on-the-fly decisions. One thing I can tell other managers/leaders: you 100% will not go wrong being good to your people rn. This yesterday from @robbykwok, our head of People. pic.twitter.com/2FMibCmYd4
— Stewart Butterfield (@stewart) March 15, 2020
Meanwhile, Slack, which is now a 2,000-person enterprise with 18 offices in 10 countries, is itself a case study in the coronavirus’s impact on team productivity. Under normal circumstances a place where staffers do quite a bit of their collaborating in person, the company has sent everyone home and is gaining a new understanding of how its own tools fare at an unprecedented moment in history.
“In real time, we’re seeing how the product is being used for 100% remote work,” says Yehoshua. “We’ve written some things on our blog to help people with what we’re learning.”
Reassessing everything
Though the new Slack isn’t an utterly radical departure from the old Slack, the company didn’t set out to minimize disruption. Instead, it tried to be ruthlessly objective about assessing and correcting long-time deficiencies. As VP of design Ethan Eismann uses Zoom to show me a slide of the main Slack screen in its existing form, he laments how many unlabeled icons and hidden pieces of functionality it contains. “There are no less than 15 different things that, as a new user, I have to understand,” he says.
Slack therefore began the design process with as few assumptions as possible. “It was really important for us to take a big step back and think about, ‘Well, what would Slack looks like if we rebuilt it from scratch?'” says Eismann.
Months ago, the company began roughing out prototypes of a variety of new elements, then tried them on for size—sometimes in working form. In some, a strip of icons along the left-hand side of the screen provided access to features such as search and integrated apps. In another, some of that functionality was part of a drawer that popped up from the bottom: “I liked it quite a bit, but I was an outlier,” says Eismann wistfully.
Slack, in other words, had settled on a user interface that had a lot in common with one of the most pervasive productivity tools of them all: the web browser. And that was fine, even though the company had explored more inventive designs along the way. “One important principle that started to emerge was not reinventing the wheel,” says Eismann.
Slack also took a fresh look at its most important navigational tool, the left-hand sidebar. Paid users, for example, can now organize channels, conversations, and apps into collapsible sections—allowing you to put everything related to your own team or a particular project in one place.
As Slack revised the sidebar, it also tried to make better use of its main center pane, which is usually dedicated to your current conversation. Now more features use that prime real estate rather than shunting you off elsewhere. A feature called People, for example, fills the center pane with a guide to your coworkers, with nice big photos and details such as their title and phone number.
Listening (usually) to users
As much as Slack valued the input of the real users it involved in the process, design is not a democracy. The final product reflects both user feedback and the Slack team’s confidence in its own expertise and instinct.
Some Slack Champions, for instance, argued that the new top bar hogged too much space. “We actually did the math,” says Eismann. “We weren’t really saving people all that many pixels by not having that top bar. And so we decided to keep it, even though we received feedback from some of the Champions that they didn’t like it as much.” As the bar became more familiar, grumbling subsided.
In the end, changes that made it into the new version were driven by the need to serve Slack users worldwide, who number 12 million as of last October—beginners, intermediate types, and old pros alike. “We needed to make some hard choices based on our understanding of what’s best for the majority of our users,” says Eismann. “This is a key part of design.”
A sturdier foundation
Like any good redesign, the new Slack is in part about what’s still to come. “It’s really hard for teams at Slack to build on top of this disorganized mess,” says Eismann, referring to the existing design. “And so we knew that we needed to go back to the basics and start fresh in order to make sure we have a good foundation.”
When Slack introduces features henceforth, adds Yehoshua, “there are more obvious places to put them to make sure that they’re more discoverable. Having the lightning bolt for our shortcuts now is a much more intuitive place for people to add new shortcuts. Having the sidebar organization will continue to pay benefits.” New stuff is all very well—but it’s infinitely more meaningful if people can find it without playing hide and seek.