Slack’s biggest redesign ever tries to tame the chaos of your workday

image via theverge.com
image via theverge.com

The overarching goal of the new design, Weiss says, was to give users more context and more focus. “We think of these as modes of work that you have,” he says. “I catch up on everything that’s going on, I respond to inbound, I triage and respond to all the activity, and then I go through my to-do list of what I need to follow up on — that’s what this is organizing, is modes of working rather than types of objects.” For more chaotic, everything-all-at-once Slack users, Slack has also been reworking its multi-windowing system so you can have multiple views open at a time. It all adds up to not quite a total reorganization of Slack but at least a slightly different way of thinking about the app. Before, it was two things: the list of all your stuff on the side and whatever you’re currently engaged with in the middle. Now, there’s a third organizational layer in between, aiming to sort and filter all the stuff you care about in a few different ways. “It was about actually putting all the things that we’ve built over time into a sensible, comprehensible place,” Weiss says. It’s going to look and feel really different to a lot of users at first, but Weiss is confident users will like the new tools. And if the pitch doesn’t resonate, well, that’s why Slack rolls out new products slowly — and has been testing it for a while.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/9/23824562/slack-redesign-app-dms-activity-later