Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Anya A New Way to Work!

Slack is a cloud-based team collaboration tool, used by teams around the world to chat with each other effortlessly.

Slack is rapidly taking over emails and meetings, as the leading platform for office and team communication.

The Brief

Our brief is quite interesting as it has nothing to do with Slack’s team collaboration, but to come up with a new feature, that will help Slack move to mainstream market as a personal communication tool.

Sprint Duration

Time Frame

We had 2 weeks to complete the project with a high fidelity prototype as the final deliverable.

The Team

I was lucky to work with a great team on this project. Though we worked on some parts of the project together (like affinity mapping, ideation, and presentation), we worked individually on other parts like interviews, persona creation, and presentation materials.

‘A’ Team

My Roles

Apart from the below UX roles, I utilized my ‘Scrum Master’ experience, to bring the team together to deliver the best outcome within the time frame allotted.

My Roles in the Project

The Process — Double Diamond

Double diamond process maps the ‘divergent’ and ‘convergent’ stages of design process.

UX Design Process

First Diamond is about “Doing the right thing”. This consists of “Research” and “Synthesis of Research” to validate if we are solving the right problem.
Second Diamond is about “Doing things right”. This consists of “Ideation” and “Prototyping” to find the best solution to the right problem within the constraints of time and money.

Diamond 1 — Research and Synthesis

Slack Research

Every great design begins with great research. We kicked off the project, with research on Slack.

Slack Research Topics

Slack Research Insights

Clear, simple and charismatic motto and core values
From idea to billion-dollar business in just 3 years
Maintains clean UI by clever information architecture and content strategy
Strong paid customer base
Freemium business-model
Little to no interest in personal communication or social networking space

Competitor Analysis

Competitor Analysis

We researched Slack’s direct competitors like Flock. We also researched key players in personal communication and social networking space.

Topic Maps

Insights from Slack research and competitor analysis helped us to identify topic maps.

Topic Maps

User Research Method — Interviews

We chose interviews as our user research method, to understand the stories behind Slack usage. Our topic maps helped us drive the questions for our users.

Profile of users we interviewed:

Slack users
Slack experience level (Novice – Experts)
Active users of online communication
Active users of social media

Affinity Mapping

Affinity mapping is a process that helps to identify themes, trends, and areas of improvement from the huge data collected through interviews.

Affinity Mapping

Discovery from Affinity Mapping

New users have learnability challenges
Intermediate-advanced users have cluttering challenges (Too many channels)
Most users haven’t used some of Slack’s powerful feature like bots and app integration

Our most important discovery — “Our users won’t use Slack for personal communication”

Our Persona

Persona

As UX designers we constantly ask the question “Whose problem are we trying to solve”?

We could draw out our persona based on the discovery of affinity mapping.

Are we solving the right problem?

The Challenge

We have hit an impasse at our project, as we realized we are not solving the right problem. Both Slack users and Slack business are not looking to use it beyond workplace communication. We decided to pivot and provide a return brief.

Return Brief Scope

The Return Brief

Based on the insights from our research, our return brief was about focusing on areas that benefit both Slack and it’s customers. We decided to focus on enhancing the experience of Slack’s target customers — Teams using Slack for workplace communication.

Diamond 2— Ideation and Prototyping

Ideation Process

We used the design studio ideation process, that consists of a collective idea generation methodology that is time-boxed.

Ideation Process

Ideas Generated

We generated a lot of good ideas. Some of them were too wide or too deep.

Some of the Ideas Generated

Dot Voting

A democratic dot-voting process was used by our team to choose the best idea.

Democratic Way of Choosing the IdeaThe Chosen Idea!

Introducing Slack Board — The Chosen Idea

The Slack board is a new feature for advanced Slack users like Christy. Previously Christy has to organize different types of information from multiple channels (messages, images, links, documents) in different ways.

The Slack board is one place to store all information of interest from multiple channels in one place (classified into boards). Christy can create as little or as many boards as she likes.

Slack Board — User Flows

Creating a new Slack Board — 3 clicks

Accessing any Slack Board — 3 clicks

Adding pins to any Slack Board — 2 clicks

Slack Board — Low fidelity Wireframes

Adding information of interest from channels to boards

Slack Board — User Testing and Feedback

We tested the low fidelity prototype with our classmates (who have been using GA for a while) and even one of our instructors.

We had a very positive reception to the idea.

Location of the ‘Pin’ icon — Testing helped us to identify the best place to have the ‘Pin’ icon.

Pin Location

Access to Slack Board — We had a separate icon to access Slack board. We incorporated it into the hamburger icon to be in sync with Slack’s UI design.

Icon to access Slack board

Expansion button — We also had to redesign the expansion button on viewing the boards, to make it more cohesive.

Expansion button confused our users

Slack Board — High fidelity Prototype

Oct 9, 2017 2:32 AM.webm

Presentation and Feedback

We presented the new feature to our class and instructors.

We got great feedback on the innovative idea, our decision to go with a return brief and the interactive high-fidelity prototype that was easy to understand and imagine what the new feature will look like.

Minna Maltari, Teacher’s Assistant, General Assembly

“The topic was difficult but you were successfully able to pivot from the original brief and find a way to address current user problem.”

Sean Breasley, Teacher’s Assistant, General Assembly

“Overall a strong solution to this brief as it was a tricky one (adding a feature to something that already has a lot of features) and I felt you handled this problem well.”

Andrew Stockwell, Lead Instructor, General Assembly

“Great understanding of brand identity, clear research methodology, clever return brief, innovative new feature and rich high fidelity prototype.”

Project Takeaways

UX design process is a great way of understanding “if we are solving the right problem”
A democratic way of working as a team provides great results
Return brief needs to be backed up with research data

So what do you think of this new feature? Feel free to chat with me if you are interested!

UX Case Study — Can Slack be used outside work? was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

UX Case Study — Can Slack be used outside work?

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