❤Improving Productivity and Collaboration ❤
Slack
Overview
Slack is a messaging platform used by professional groups to relay important information across team members. However, team channels limit fluid collaboration as they lack message prioritization and flexible content organization which means important ideas and conversations get easily buried in the chat.
Our designs aim to provide a more fluid experience on Slack by giving users an efficient way to pin messages and filtering out what the most important content is for the team. Notification prompts and auto-suggestions were just some of the ideas we pondered to create a better collaborative experience.
As a UX designer on the team, I was one of the team’s main Figma designers and helped to develop both lo-fi and hi-fi prototypes. I took part in reiterating our prototypes based on feedback received during our user interviews and helped format group presentations. From September 2021 to December 2021, this 11 week project and its designs were ideated and executed by my team and I.
The Problem
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Slack users must manually seek out updates and information which interferes with their workflow. Important information is buried under numerous messages which causes users to repeat the same questions and answers. As such, interference in team communications decreases overall productivity.
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Goals
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Our team came together with the goal of improving Slack to better support and enable online communication and coordination. Since we used Slack for communication, we tried to view the platform and its issues through the lens of a Slack user. Therefore, we wanted to create a more fluid method of collaboration for users by providing pining and auto-suggestion solutions to the organizational issues present in Slack.
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Chipping Away With Research
We wanted to get general feedback regarding Slack, so we got to work surveying 12 individuals and personally interviewing another 12 individuals.
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User Interviews:
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Who did we interview?
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12 individuals (ages 18-22) who were full-time UCSD students
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A majority only used Slack for classes and internships.
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These users used different messaging platforms daily to communicate with their friends and family.
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11 out of 12 users mainly used Discord to message their teammate or stay updated on classes.
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Only 1 individual used Slack in their day to day.
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We asked questions about:
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What they use Slack for
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Why they use Slack rather than other platforms
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How often they use Slack
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How they generally feel about Slack
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Key Insights:
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Most users aren’t long-term goal oriented individuals meaning features that benefit in the long run don’t seem as helpful or engaging for users to use as immediate solutions.
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Individuals do not waste their time sifting through new messages even for valuable information.
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Users seem to like if the system were to suggest a list of options they can do for a particular message.
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Information Architecture
Playing with Concepts
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Slack User Flow
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Three different features → One big solution
As with many problems, there were multiple ways we approached and experimented with our design problem. From our user feedback and member consensus, we decided to get shelve our ideas of rearranging the general channel structure to streamline our ideas and focus more on individual channel implementations that can better improve collaboration and communication between members. We learned that users are more inclined to use features that are more salient and auto-suggested to them as opposed to having to learn these features on their own. These types of ideas were prototyped and our primary solutions for providing a more fluid collaboration on the Slack interface for better overall productivity.
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1) “While You Were Away…” Prompt → Increased Efficiency
The “While you away…” pop-up modal that was ideated to help improve productivity by prioritizing messages and notify users of what they had missed. This would decrease the likelihood of the same question being asked numerous times and provide users some peace of mind as they wouldn’t need to sift through the numerous messages for important updates. They could view the context surrounding the message or directly click on it to view it in the associated channel to update themselves with the most relevant messages in a less overwhelming manner.
The feature comes in the form of a pop-up modal which may seem like the equivalent of a pop-up to some users, but it’s produced in such a way that they can’t ignore important updates that have occurred within their team. This was designed to increase overall productivity by reducing the user’s need to sift through numerous messages for any important updates and allow them to focus on what’s important on their work schedule.
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2) Auto-Suggestions [Q&A + Related Messages] → Improved Productivity
We understand that not all users are the same and know that some users will choose to disregard the “While you were away…” module, yet still ask a similar question that has already been answered. In such situations, we designed a feature that will prompt users with an auto-suggestion for relevant messages. Users can find answers to a question they are typing in the message field or see whether a topic has already been recently discussed within the channel.
We found that this reduces redundancy of messages and improves discoverability of important information so that users can spend less time searching and more time collaborating. This feature was an idea we wanted to implement in Slack because we wanted a salient way to keep users well informed of what has already been asked to prevent any redundancy from occurring. Thus, this feature aims to improve the overall productivity and collaboration of the team across the platform.
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3) Auto-Suggesting Pinned Messages→ Higher Salience
A majority of users are not long-term goal oriented individuals and as such they seek immediate solutions to their problem. Therefore, this design implements a system that will analyze a user’s message to see if it contains links. If links are present, the system will ask the user if they would like to pin the message once they send it.
Through user testing, our team chose to explore this idea further rather than sticking with previous ideas of forming threads under certain messages which users found unnecessary and visually cluttering. Auto-suggestion for pinning messages gained more positive feedback as users were able to automatically pin messages rather than needing to scroll through the messaging options to perform the task.The solution to their problems are right at their fingertips when it is suggested automatically by the system which increases overall team productivity.
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Final Results
Although our design didn’t ship, we came together as a group and observed through user testing that our design implementations increased overall efficiency, productivity, and collaboration. User testing showed that our pop-up notification feature decreased the time needed to sift through messages by up to 2 minutes depending on the individual who we interviewed. This would have the potential to increase productivity for teams and allow them to focus on what is important and relevant at the moment.
Through this project, we learned that humans are not long-term goal oriented individuals and as such we ideated features that would provide immediate solutions to prevalent Slack problems.
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