PRODUCT DESIGN USER RESEARCH PROTOTYPING

OVERVIEW

Slack is a powerful communication platform that is increasingly replacing email and is an essential tool for thousands of companies during the incoming age of remote online work. As of October 2019, Slack has 20 million daily active users, and has been growing exponentially as the mobile and desktop experiences are undergoing whole redesigns.

ROLE

As a product design intern on the expansion team, I worked closely with my mentor and product design leadership to define the details of the features I was working on. I created design flows, prototypes, sketches, and high-fidelity prototypes for these features. I also collaborated with engineering, research, and product management to ensure a high-quality implementation and to ship a polished user experience.

Today, users can create shared channels from our Desktop or Web experiences only. By unlocking mobile shared channel creation, we’re providing a more complete experience for our users that will also serve as a positive growth lever for accelerating the network.

[FIG 01]
VISUALIZING SHARED CHANNELS

Because over 5k shared channels are made each week on the desktop version of Slack, how could we keep the entry points consistent so that the user experience on mobile is still familiar?

I also had to work in parallel with other teams working on the mobile designs, so there was a lot of collaboration in order to keep parity between all of the new features being developed!

Through iterative design, I approached the design solution by focusing on bridging the gap between the existing desktop experience and the new mobile experience of shared channels. I wanted to parallel the existing user experience in order to recreate the natural flow of steps needed to make a new shared channel, but with the change of focusing on sharing a link versus inputting emails.

From my first project at Slack, I learned a lot about the value of feedback and about the iterative design process. I also faced the new challenge of continuing a project that was already in progress, as it was passed onto me by my mentor! This really put into perspective the amount of collaboration that comes with working in the industry.

1. Where can we place this user education?
2. How can we make this feel helpful to a user rather than telling them to 'create a new channel' when it feels irrelevant?
3. How do we avoid conflicts with existing education?

The solution I reached required consideration of the available screen real-estate as well as minimizing the number of steps users would have to encounter in order to absorb the new user education. This project was also hands-on with the engineering team especially, as we dealt with the techncalities of scalability across different window sizes.

This project dealt with finetuning the user flow of accepting shared channel invites. By reducing the amount of roadblocks users may face when joining a shared channel, we hoped to increase the usage of shared channels altogether, as users who utilize this paid feature or more likely to retain their premium subscription even after the initial 90-day trial.

In order to improve the current shared channel acceptance flow, I had to understand the dead-ends that users reach when trying to accept an invite. By outlining the process, it was a lot easier to grasp the pain points of the current system in place.

I learned that there are two distinct channel states when it comes to handling accepting an invite to a shared channel, and by distinguishing these states, we could better streamline the invite flow.

By simplifying the user flow of this invitation process, there is less probability for user dropout rates. From this project, I learned a lot about the power of user research and human-interaction when it comes with different interfaces.