Slack Redesign

7 Weeks

Extending the Slack mobile application to help users maintain a healthier work-life balance.

Impact

Completed two high-fidelity prototypes to tackle one of the design challenges for COGS 127, the Data-Driven UX/Product design course at UC San Diego.

My Role

UX Research

UX Design

Prototyping

Tools

Figma

FigJam

Digital Sketching

Teammates

Jodie Li

Thoa Nguyen

Kayla Luong

Introduction

Slack is a messaging and collaboration platform that has taken the business world by storm since its launch in 2013. With its easy-to-use interface and a wide range of features, Slack has become a popular choice for teams looking to streamline communication and improve productivity. As of 2021, Slack boasts an impressive user base, with 12 million daily active users across the globe according to Slack's latest financial reports.

In 2020, the platform reported a revenue of $902 million, representing a 57% increase from the previous year. As remote work has become a norm, businesses and organizations are becoming more and more reliant on platforms like Slack to stay connected and productive.

Design Process

Background

While Slack is a popular tool for improving communication and productivity, some users may find themselves experiencing increased stress levels due to the platform's constant notifications and the pressure to be always available and responsive. According to a survey conducted by RescueTime, a time-management software company, Slack was found to be the second most stressful app among knowledge workers, with 38% of respondents reporting feeling overwhelmed by the constant flow of messages.

As regular users of Slack ourselves, we deeply empathized with the challenges that Slack users in organizations with multiple workspaces experienced. As a result, we sought to redesign Slack to promote a healthy balance of online-collaboration and sustainable work-life balance.

Primary Research

We conducted interviews with 9 Slack users (ages 19-50), who used Slack as the main communication platform for their respective professional (Splunk, Amazon, Protolab, etc.) and pre-professional (Design For America, Cognitive Science Student Association, Triton Software Engineering, etc.) organizations.

These were the top findings from our user interviews:

8 out of 9 users used the mobile Slack app.

This led us to the decision to redesign the mobile application of Slack instead of the desktop application, since the mobile application was primarily utilized by our user group.

4 out of 9 mentioned that response that they would check messages immediately, but their response speed depended on the urgency of the message.

This finding revealed an inefficiency and disruption in Slack's messaging workflow--users frequently opened and checked their Slack messages, but were delaying their responses based on the content of the messages they received.

9 out of 9 users had Slack notifications turned on.

Despite 100% of our users having their Slack notifications turned on, we noticed that none of our users were leveraging the Notification Schedule feature due to the lack of discoverability, and the arduous interactions required to use it.

Secondary Research

In addition to user interviews, we read up on app store reviews to gather some general insight as to what pain points a broader group of Slack users experienced.

Below are some of our most notable findings:

User Personas

Below are the user personas we developed to focus our redesign approach.

Identifying the Design Problem

Consolidating our research, we discovered that many Slack users face challenges with managing the volume of messages received and staying on top of notifications, leading to increased stress levels and reduced productivity.

Slack currently does not provide effective tools for streamlining message content and managing notifications. As a result, users often find themselves sifting through irrelevant or repetitive messages, struggling to prioritize which messages to respond to, and feeling overwhelmed by the constant notifications.

This led us to establish our problem statement:

Slack users in professional and pre-professional organizations need a way to streamline Slack message content and manage notifications in order to maintain healthy digital boundaries between work and life in a post-pandemic world.

Competitive Analysis

We conducted competitive analyses for Slack to gain a better understanding of the messaging and collaboration platform landscape and to identify areas of improvement on both the sending and receiving end of messages.

Notification Sending

Notification Scheduling

UX Flows

To tackle our design problem, we explored two strategies.

1. Content Priority

This UX flow outlines the process users undergo when creating and sending a message in Slack. In this flow, the feature of labeling a message with a particular level of priority (Important or Urgent) is spotlighted.

Messages that are "Important" and "Urgent" are visually signified and organized. Opening the Slack application to view notifications after a weekend or vacation no longer needs to be an overwhelming or stressful experience because messages will be clearly organized according to response priority.

2. Notification Schedule

This UX flow overviews the case in which a user needs to customize their notification schedule. This particular flow specifically captures the feature of customizing notifications on a weekly overview and how one would go about discovering and implementing it.

In order to further “streamline message content” and “maintain healthy boundaries between work and life”, we decided to hone in on improving the visibility of notifications. We are not limiting the number of notifications but improving how and under what specific conditions notifications are sent. This inherently streamlines the messages received and gives users the ability to set boundaries for their work-life.

Final Design Solutions

Following UI sketches, low-fidelity prototyping, usability testing on our prototype, and multiple rounds of design iterations based on weeks of feedback from 25 student designers, we were able to propose a redesign of the Slack mobile application that would help streamline message content and manage notifications to help users maintain healthy digital work-life boundaries.

View Full Prototype

Presenting, our final high-fidelity prototypes:

1. CONTENT PRIORITY

A. Message Flagging System

Users can now flag messages as important or urgent. These messages have clear visual signifiers to denote them and are distinguished within the message feed through color-coding.

We defined the message priority levels as follows:

Important

Viewing is recommended, but the message doesn’t require an immediate response

Urgent

The recipient is urgently notified (haptic feedback), and an immediate response is highly recommended

Flagging Important Messages

Flagging Urgent Messages

B. Message Flagging Shortcut

More experienced Slack users know that the forward slash / opens up a quick commands menu of shortcuts. To accommodate these more experienced users and increase discoverability and flexibility of use for this new feature, users can simply type / + important or urgent to label the priority of their message content.

Important Message Shortcut

Urgent Message Shortcut

C. Home Page Organization

Important and Urgent messages are automatically organized and categorized on the Home Page.

D. Message Tagging

Users can now implement tags in their Slack messages. Tags are meant to be a quick and effective way to provide some more context about a message's content to recipients.

By adding relevant tags, such as project names or team names, message sending and receiving in Slack can be given the appropriate level of visibility without overwhelming recipients. Our goal with this content tagging feature was to buffer potential overuse of "Important" and "Urgent" flagging.

2. NOTIFICATION SCHEDULE

Analyzing the Current Issues:

Notification Schedule is difficult to access and has poor discoverability; 9 out of 9 users did not know it existed.

Limited customization - only 1 notification time block can be made for each day.
- Ex: Unable to to set notifications for 8-10 AM and 1-6 PM on a single day.

Inefficient functionality
- Ex: In Custom, must click into each individual day to turn notifications off for that day.

Does not match the mental model of users

Our Redesign Approach:

Increased discoverability of Notification Schedule by moving it onto main menu settings.

Users can add time blocks for each day.

Users can toggle notifications for each day of the week on/off.

Visual schedule available for view not only matches the mental model of users, but leverages user familiarity with calendars in applications like Google Calendar and When2meet.

A closer look at our Notification Schedule screens:

Notification Schedule is now more discoverable due to its placement on the main user settings page.

Notifications can now easily be toggled on/off without needing to click into each individual day of the week.

You can now add multiple notification blocks to a single day.

A visual view of the notification schedule is now available for users.

Takeaways

Learned that the design process is oftentimes not a perfect double-diamond, but it is still important to leverage other strategies to put assumptions aside.
Learned how to pinpoint a clear design problem through ambiguous user research findings.
Learned to not be afraid to pivot, adjust, and iterate on our designs and approaches based on feedback and usability testing results.
In the future, conduct more usability testing on high-fidelity prototypes, consider accessibility implications, and work with developers to create a functioning front-end development mockup.