Slack Concept Study: Do Workspaces Lead to Productivity?
Slack is increasingly becoming a necessity in our everyday work-lives, whether it’s communication between members of a student team or among start-up’s doing remote work. However, a widespread complaint is how in an effort for greater efficiency, work organization and ease in communication, Slack users find themselves burdened with incessant messages, rampant notifications and a need to balance valuable time with the fear of potentially missing an important message.
So What is Currently Missing From Slack?
There is a subtle irony in spending so much time on a work management app that’s supposed to make my work life more efficient and manageable. So why exactly do I spend so much time on Slack?
The Workspace Rabbit Hole
In order to make sure this problem wasn’t uniquely mine alone, I turned towards my community of faithful Slack users along with a few who don’t primarily communicate via Slack.
“frustrating whenever I miss a message”
“I check several times per hour”
“I need to use it to coordinate large groups”
What was encouraging about crowdsourcing people’s behavioral patterns for Slack is how while my personal (issues) was only a small piece of the larger picture, the problem was there and a definite pain point for the people I interviewed.
Root of the Problem
On the surface, my conversations seemingly reflected an issue with a lack of notifications. But after digging further, I realized more notifications could be the last thing Slack users want. The underlying issue was that users wanted an efficient way to stay informed and keep track of important messages. Currently, “keeping tabs” on every project and organization a user belonged to would quite literally mean scrolling through each workspace and channel and eyeing the messages to make sure something important or time sensitive didn’t slip through. This is time-consuming and doesn’t always meet users’ end goal of responding to the messages that most need their attention.
Reading Between the Lines
After confirming that Slack is causing quite some anxiety, at least among its student-age users, I sat down with some other frequent Slack users and design enthusiasts to see if we can provide a better experience for the users.
Connie Huang ’22, Matthew Scullin ‘22, and Yunyun Wang ‘21
We thought about the pain points and the current aspects of Slack that creates friction for the users. We explored the key functionality of Slack that we wanted to emphasize but also improve on. This led us to three problem spaces involving customization, efficiency and organization.
A diagram of our ideation process and final solutions reached
Designing Towards a More Personalized User Experience
Personal Workspace. Eliminates the need for users to switch between workspaces to learn of new activity, while maintaining workspace integration which is a big plus. There’s greater potential for users to feel more ownership over their Slack groups and greater control over the content they see and prioritize.
The feature that was ultimately chosen to implement
Solution Spaces
Information Hierarchy
The personal workspace of “Home Space” is designed to serve as the easy to use and organized starting point for users as they navigate the different channels, conversations and chat threads that need their attention. Thus, it’s important for navigation to the home space to be highly visible and easily accessible, while still integrated with the existing Slack ecosystem.
Exploration of the Home Space
There’s a lot that can go into this starting point screen. But ultimately, space is limited so I thought through the most important things to display and the best ways to convey how features are interconnected.
High-Fidelity Flow: Creating a Personalized User Experience
High-Fidelity Prototype: Creating a Personalized User Experience With the Home Space
Importance of Staying Connected
The digital revolution has emphasized time and time again how crucial it is to stay connected. As more jobs become remote and more teams span different regions and time zones, collaboration and work management tools like Slack are a total game changer. They’ve become the backbone to start-ups and student teams alike, and getting right this next problem of staying informed can help users feel renewed sense of ease when they communicate with their peers.