Slack Redesign

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic marked the tough transitional period of the traditional workplace environment from majorly in-person, to remote. Not only were companies tasked with keeping productivity high, they also faced the problem of fostering a similar workplace environment online when their employees are far apart, and together only on video screens. For this project, we were interested in how we can improve productivity and interpersonal relationships in a pandemic economy. Seeing as Slack is a popular service that’s used by both students and working professionals, we figured it would be very fitting for us to redesign the Slack experience. 

This redesign was created for COGS 127: Data Driven UX/Product Design @ UC San Diego.

First, we conducted 8 user interviews with Slack users to understand their experiences with the platform, and distributed a Google Forms survey to supplement our interviews with additional quantitative and qualitative data.

We created 3 different user personas from our findings: the new design graduate, a software engineer, and a project manager. During our brainstorm, we also found and considered another persona group: college students who use Slack for their student organizations and (sometimes) classes. However, we decided not to focus on them because unlike working professionals, students will frequently meet up on campus together, thus they don't relate to that isolating feeling compared to those in the workforce.

We looked at 4 other competitors to see what works well for them, and what doesn't in a SWOT analysis. In summary, some insights we found were:

We decided on 4 main interface additions that would help solve our problem statement:

We also will be redesigning Slack Huddle, their current video conferencing functionality, by increasing its discoverability. It’s such a hidden channel on their interface that many users didn't know such a feature was offered. We didn’t even know about it until we started this project!

We first broke into pairs and created two different wireframes. The main difference between the two was that Prototype A, which I worked on, implemented more project management functionalities, whereas Prototype B focused on highlighting internal teams. We conducted a round of primlimary testing to see which interface worked better, and overall interviewees preferred Prototype A (pictured below). 

In the end, we did choose to go with Prototype A because it has a cleaner interface and makes use of space better. I also defended that functionality is an important business pillar for Slack so we should be staying as close to their business goals as possible; and I felt like Prototype A did better in that mark.

We received a lot of the useful feedback from our wireframe testing session that prompted important design considerations to discuss (written below). We made sure to include those appropriate changes into the next iteration.

Before completing the final edits of the prototype, there were still a couple issues with the Team Hierarchy and Management pages that arose and needed to be addressed.

The new blocky theme allowed us to integrate public profiles so employees can explore their coworkers background and interests. Although a lot of people loved this, and it definitely helped solve our problem statement better than the inital wireframe, the blocky theme took up a lot of vertical space. To combat this issue, I suggested that all teams would be hidden behind expandable and collapsible cards.

We also had some issues with the Idea Board. How can we see more sticky notes besides the first 5? What can you do with the sticky notes? In our first iteration, we made the idea board section expand to a thread conversation of the idea and its corresponding replies. However, we realized this was just a glorified #idea-board text channel. So we scraped that idea and went for an interactive whiteboard functionality instead, pulling inspiration from Miro. This allows team members to quickly jot down ideas and move them around to how they see fit.

Finally after 10 weeks of work we finished our Slack redesign! You can fully interact with our prototype from this Figma link.

My main responsibility in the final prototype was creating the Team Hierarchy feature. I also went through our project and created many supporting screens to add more interactive capabilities in the final prototype. 

This was my last college UX design project, and I'm happy to say it's my best one. Special shoutout to my amazing team, and our mentor Adam for helping us along the way with valuable and candid feedback! I was challenged to really keep in mind what’s best for our end users, and not get caught up in out-of-reach ideas in my head. It's important to remember that in the end, we are designing for them.

Personally, I think we did an amazing job at extending Slack's capabilities as a platform and it's something that I truly could see being implemented and beneficial in real life. Our TA even complemented us on our visual design skills and said it looks like something Slack designers would create! Overall, we were really proud of what we accomplished in just 10 weeks. Some other takeaways:

Be open to change
If there was one thing to takeaway from this project, it's this. We initially came into this project with just the voice channels in mind, but as our ideas grew, so did the scale of our project (for the better)! During our first few meetings together, I would've never thought that this would be the final product we made, and that's all because we remained open to discuss new ideas.

Remember to stay within business constraints and style guides
Prior to this, I've never completed a project of this caliber on an existing application; I've only created my own app concepts. Though it is easier in the sense that I have an existing base to start off from, it can be difficult at times to not stray too far from the app’s original purpose, business constraints, and style guide. Sometimes our big ideas get the better of us, but we ultimately need to take a step back and think about if this would truly be feasible in real life.
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