Slack introduces a new sidebar. Added “Later” button and function to list newcomers – Internet Clock

Slack Technologies, a 100% subsidiary of Salesforce, issued a press release on August 9, revealing that the user interface of the company’s “Slack” communication tool will be revamped.

“Home” (in English, the home page), “Activity” (such as Activity), “DM” (such as DM), “Later” (such as Later) in the pane displaying the workspace on the left side of the traditional sidebar. Slack states that it will make it easier to navigate between desired workspaces and channels, improving user productivity.

According to Slack, the new UI will be rolled out to all users over the next few months.

Added “Home”, “Activities”, “DM” and “Later” to the left sidebar,Access curated information

Slack can be used as a client application (hereinafter referred to as the app version) and as a web version, and although the basic usability is the same for both, the app version is more user-friendly due to the higher degree of freedom it has in design. Needless to say, it is easier. When Slack was first launched, the app version had problems such as large memory consumption and slow startup, but a major update was introduced in 2019, which reduced memory consumption by half. Improvements such as faster startup time have also been made (Related article on July 24, 2019, “Slack reduces memory usage by 50%, startup is 33% faster. Significantly lighter and faster by rewriting code from scratch. Transformation” ).

Since then, new services and functions have been added on the cloud side, so there hasn’t been much change on the client side, but this time, the user interface, including the app version, has been greatly updated.

What can be done this time is the display pane showing the workspace button, which was displayed on the left side of the sidebar in the app version. Here are the new homepage, activity, DM, later, more, + buttons added, etc. With them, you can access each information hierarchically by simply pressing the button on the left sidebar.

The Home page displays the workspace toggles, conversations, and the list of members belonging to the workspace, displayed in the traditional sidebar. If you want to use Slack’s traditional sidebar feature, it’s as simple as hitting Home.

In Activity, a list of newcomers such as topics, mentions, and reactions are displayed, and you can check the difference from last time in the list. Also, in “DM”, the DM is displayed as a list. If there are unread messages in Activities and Direct Messages, the number of unread messages will be displayed on each icon.

activity button

The Later option allows you to save messages you’ve checked in Home, Activities, Direct Messages, etc., but reply to them later, and then process them slowly when you have time. In the past, many users would have used methods like marking it as “unread” again, but in the future, saving it to “for later” would be convenient because they would no longer need to do that.

At the bottom of the display on the left sidebar are two buttons: search and “+” (create). For search, you can access the search function and search across workspaces and channels. The search results display the top posts on the left, and when selected, the topic details are displayed on the right. This makes it easy to interact with the search results by liking them.

With the “+” button, you can perform tasks such as posting to DM and Slack Canvas, and starting a messaging meeting. It would be nice to understand that it is such a button as “Create new mail” which has recently become popular in mail client applications.

Search and the “+” (Create) button

It can’t go back to the traditional view, so it’s designed to make switching easier

“Slack has received feedback from many users, and based on that, we’ve spent many years researching and testing what type of interface would be best,” said Tina Chen (Senior Director of Product Design) at Slack Technologies. “We believe that the new user enable interface that was introduced this time around Users can organize information and focus on communicating with other users, which will increase productivity.”We are doing this,” he said, stressing that users will be able to communicate more easily with other users, focus on work and improve productivity.

Slack introduced this new UI because Slack had added new features over the past few years and needed to align them with traditional Slack features.

“The current user interface was introduced over three years ago, and since then we have introduced many powerful new features such as workflows, the panel, and group meetings. As a result of thinking about how to use it as a group, we decided that it would be best to bundle such functionality, resulting in The introduction of a new UI, however, of course, the introduction of a new UI is a burden for the user, and I don’t think it’s good to re-learn Slack, so I leave the traditional way of using Slack like home. I want them to gradually get used to the new view. Existing users can switch more easily by leaving traditional Slack at home soon.

Chen explained that the new user interface will be rolled out to all users gradually, and users will not be able to return to the previous view. In addition, for companies that sign up for the Enterprise Grid plan for large companies, the company’s Slack admin will be able to choose from several dates when the new UI will be introduced. something. Even then, it will eventually become a new UI at some point, so Slack admins will need to prepare a guide for the new UI by then.