Slack’s Latest Redesign for Newbies
Slack is used by millions worldwide by major corporations to help them work together and stay productive.
Team messaging tools have definitely gained momentum in business collaboration in recent years. Early users of slack were those companies who were heavily focused on collaboration and communication. It’s worth noting that an increasing number of companies are quickly establishing remote-work policies due to the pandemic (COVID-19). How slack is leveraging the current market opportunity? Slack is releasing an update designed to make everything from basics to advanced features more approachable.
Defining the market space and identifying user pains
As more companies embrace the remote work culture, they need a tool/platform to keep their teams engaged. Organizations are realizing that their usual skype or messenger is not enough. They need a central messaging system where employees can look for information that can be shared with a group of people. Thus reducing the need for constant 1–1 communication and repetitive context sharing.
Slack offers rich features and often new users are overwhelmed by the number of channels, conversations, notifications. It does have a learning curve and it might not be as straightforward for the non-tech savvy users. Slack is currently in the limelight, but there are many tools (Microsoft Teams, Flock) attempting to beat it and help users even better. Slack had to make some quick changes to make it really, really easy for people who have never used Slack.
Nailing the product experience by focusing on doing a few things exceptionally well
For new organizations that are getting set up for the first time, in times of urgency and need all the users to have to get up to speed fast. Users will find themselves in channels — some of which you practically live in, others that you simply check in passing. As a central messaging platform it is critical that slack facilitates users to easily communicate, navigate, discover and organize their workplace.
As a product manager, I constantly communicate with different teams in the organization and I am sure many of you will agree that it’s easy to miss some messages and you cant constantly pay attention to all the channels. With this new experience, users on paid plans will be able to organize their channels, direct messages and apps into customizable sections (as simple as dragging them into folders) within the sidebar to prioritize what deserves your attention.
If you have been a long time slack user, I am sure you have your fair share of frustrations to share after a while as it’s hard to keep up with the channels and the only way to bring some channels to your attention is to “star” them so that they appear on top. You need to mute some channels to filter through the noise and keep track of your most important notifications.
Have you ever been annoyed by the message input at the bottom, it expands as you type, it's hard to keep focused while you are typing an important message for a channel or a private message as 10s of notifications popup. By creating a drawer that expands to the full width of the screen, it gives users enough space to work on and focus. It mimics the UI of an email to make the users feel comfortable with the experience.
Many of the core features of slack are buried and while core users don't mind that experience and still use them on a daily basis. The new design brings the hidden features upfront and available on the side navigation bar (mentions & reactions, people, drafts, shortcuts to access polls, calendar, reminders) making it simpler for people to use and stay organized.
Below are exact areas where users can experience the redesign (as sourced from slack’s official post):
- Navigate channels and search across your organization with a new navigation bar
- Discover key conversations, files, apps and more
- Start a message from anywhere with a handy new compose button
- Organize channels, messages, and apps into custom, collapsible sections
- Take swift action with your apps through shortcuts.
Listening to the actual users, incorporating the feedback, prioritizing the users' needs to shape the design approach and restructuring the user experience to satisfy the needs of most users.
Offering a freemium model to fuel growth
Collectively, these improvements make it easier for anyone to use Slack, change it to how they work and access essential tools.
“Knowing how many people are sort of coming to Slack or other tools like it trying to do remote work for the first time…we kind of felt an imperative to get it in those customers’ hands as quickly as possible,” DeLanghe told Business Insider.
Offering the freemium version with a messaging limit of 10000 per workspace allows the small business and teams to test and get set up on the platform during these times. With all the new updates and the surging demand in the market, Slack hopes to onboard and engage the new users and funnel that into long term growth of the company.
The more people in your company use slack, the faster you reach that 10,000 messages limit the company needs to start paying for the service in order to not lose out on the history of messages and important information. It is all about the social separation hook if you don’t follow Slack all the time you do not and cannot take part in the conversation with your team members anymore. Everyone is now going all-in on Slack, more and more information is going into Slack and the 100s of integrations to help to simplify an organization’s workflow. Soon Slack becomes your team’s single source of information.
Slack mentions that the new look was planned and has been underway since some time, but it had to be fast-tracked because of the situational demand as Slack faces pressure from MS Teams, which is now used by 20 million people a day (compared to 12 million daily Slack users).
It is undoubtedly a great strategy that Slack has used to its advantage. We have to wait and watch if they will be able to increase the DAU. Let’s see where they land in the near future. I looking forward to trying out these features!
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