Slack has added a range of new features to its collaboration app since its last redesign three years ago. And while these features — such as Huddles voice and video calls, Canvas documents, and Connect channels — have added functionality for users, the app has become somewhat cluttered, with a growing list of tabs along the left-hand sidebar.
With that complexity in mind, Slack has again revamped its software to simplify the user experience across the desktop, mobile and web versions. The changes will begin rolling out to users today.
“We made a lot of these updates rooted in what we’ve been hearing from users, whether it’s Enterprise Grid customers wanting a single unified view into all of their workspaces and channels, or users wanting the ability to focus more,” said Brad Monroe, product management director at Slack. “And we’ve made all of these with our core mission in mind: to make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.”
The UX update will help users “focus a bit more on things that actually require their attention, rather than having to hop into an active channel quickly to see if you’re needed or not,” said Will McKeon-White, a Forrester analyst covering unified communications. “Slack’s been adding on features routinely for a few years, without a redesign of the core platform. This most recent update is focused on bringing all of these features into a single place that’s a bit easier for humans to parse.”
Slack
Slack is giving its popular collaboration app a new Home screen.
The new Home view provides access to messages and channels; the main change is aimed at customers on Slack’s Enterprise Grid, who can view all of their messages from one place without having to jump between workspaces. To help avoid message overload, Enterprise Grid users can filter which messages are available to them.
Slack has also reorganized existing tabs into what it calls “dedicated views.” For most users this means three icons on the sidebar. The DM view, as expected, hosts a user’s direct messages. Activity provides an overview of notifications such as @mentions, thread replies, reactions, and more. And the Later view contains messages and action items that users want to deal with at another time.
Customers paying for Slack’s Sales Elevate software, announced last week, can access sales information in another “dedicated view” tab placed underneath Later. Other tabs, such as Canvases and Files, will be kept in the More tab.
Although it’s not currently possible to customize the dedicated view sidebar, that’s likely to change in upcomingupdates. “A lot of this [redesign] is planting the seed for future customization,” said Monroe. This could mean that regular Canvas users will be able to place a tab shortcut on the sidebar for quick access, for instance. “You can see how we’re laying a lot of the foundation for that,” he said.
“It’s important…
2023-08-09 16:00:03
Article from www.computerworld.com rnrn