Slack Notifications Redesign
A UX case study for the KPCB Design Challenge
Prompt: Redesign a feature of a KPCB company product.
Role: Individual Project — UX Researcher / UX Designer
Timeline: 2 weeks
Background
Over the past two years, Slack has integrated itself so deeply into my life. I go to bed at night replying to Slack messages, and wake up to a multitude of notifications on my phone. It has upgraded how I communicate virtually, and has allowed me to join nation-wide communities I would never have had access to before. I believe the Slack mobile application does a fantastic job of translating their desktop flow into a mobile version, which is surely no small feat. But that got me thinking… is there any way I could potentially improve a feature of the mobile application?
Slack 101
Before diving into my project, I want to first explain Slack basics—this might make it a tad easier to understand my write-up. Slack is divided up into “workspaces” with individual “channels.” Each workspace represents the community you belong to, such as the company you work for or an organization you’re involved in. Within each workspace, you are a part of specific channels. Each channel serves its own purpose, such as a #casual channel where members can talk freely or a #work channel where members only talk about their work. A user has the ability to update notifications settings for an entire workspace and update a specific channel’s notifications settings.
Research
I have to admit — it was a little intimidating getting started on this project as Slack is already a beautifully designed application. I decided to start by looking through App store reviews and noticed a trend surrounding notifications issues.
Even though some of these notification problems may be due to back-end bugs, I decided to send out a survey and conduct a few interviews with Slack users to learn more about their experiences with mobile notifications. I found that all of my respondents generally only used the mobile app when they needed to be notified of important information and respond to DMs. However, all of my interviewees had trouble navigating workspace and channel notifications on the mobile app.
1. Users prioritize certain workspaces over others
Users are involved in workspaces that may have only been important during a short time and aren’t as relevant anymore. This is prevalent when a user is involved in multiple organizations, seasonal internships, or weekend-long hack-a-thons and design sprints. Even though certain workspaces aren’t as active, they would still like to be notified of any important announcements or DMs. They want to prioritize the active workspaces and group the remaining workspaces by their notification preference. Currently, it’s rather overwhelming to deal with notifications from multiple workspaces.
2. Changing a workspace’s notifications settings is not intuitive
When I asked my interviewees to show me how to change their workspace notifications on the mobile app, all of them admitted they never learned how to do this. I asked 3 out of 4 of the interviewees to try it out. All 3 of them initially went to the “Preferences” option on the workspace screen and soon learned they needed to go to the “You” page instead.
I realized that users most likely made this error because the desktop app nests notifications settings under “Preferences,” and all the interviewees use the desktop app more frequently than the mobile app.
3. Updating a channel’s notifications settings is inconvenient
When joining or creating a channel in a workspace, there is no indication to update or review your notification preferences for that specific channel. A user recounted the times they missed multiple important messages because they didn’t realize their notifications were on ‘Just @ mentions’ instead of ‘Every new message’ for certain channels. They stated, “It’s pretty easy to forget to update your notifications settings, but it really shouldn’t be.”
Many users may not know that when they join a workspace of more than 50 people, Slack’s default notifications settings are only notifying them of direct messages, mentions, and keywords. These notifications settings for the workspace consequently affect the channels’ notifications settings as well. Thus, the user must know to update the notifications for the workspace or each channel.
User Personas
Based on my research and subsequent pain points, I created user personas to better wrap my head around who I’m designing for.
Problem Statement
After converging all my research insights together, I landed on this specific problem statement:
How might I organize workspaces based on the user’s priorities, and make updating workspace and channel notifications more intuitive and seamless?
Ideation
I started to ideate on how I could improve the notifications experience. I decided my redesigns would not consist of improving a singular flow but instead optimizing notifications as a whole.
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In my redesign, I wanted to stay within Slack’s design guidelines to guarantee the app remain intuitive to users. My survey respondents and interviewees had little to no issues with the app’s established patterns, so I really wanted to focus on iterating on the notification features.
Proposed Solutions
1. Organizing Workspaces based on Notification Preference
To address the issue of workspace prioritization, I brainstormed ways of categorizing workspaces. In the app currently, the user can set their workspace notifications to “All New Messages,” “Direct messages & mentions,” or “Nothing.” How the user sets their notification preferences ties into the workspace's priority, so I looked into grouping workspaces by these notifications settings. Note: In my redesigns, I shortened the notification preference of “Direct messages & mentions” to “DMs & Mentions” and changed “Nothing” to “No Notifications” to be more explicit.
I initially had the idea of grouping workspaces whose notifications were set on “Direct messages & mentions” and “No Notifications.” Once the user pressed on the grouped apps, it would lead to a main notification center. However, I eventually disregarded this idea because it would challenge established design patterns. It may also lower the workspaces' visibility, as the user would’ve had to take an extra step to view them.
To maintain visibility without challenging established design patterns, I decided to group all of the workspaces by their notification preference on the current workspaces page.
By pressing on the boxes, the user can easily switch between each group. For example, if the user presses on the “DMs & Mentions” group, those workspaces will expand to be prominently shown. The “All New Messages” workspaces will shrink back into their box.
2. Workspace Notifications
Now that workspaces are organized by notification preference, how can I improve the flow of changing workspace notifications? As described in the research section, users’ first instinct was to look for notifications within the workspace’s “Preferences,” but they eventually learned that notifications were located on the “You” page.
I decided to incorporate the notifications feature within the Preferences module to align with the desktop application and the user’s mental model. I modeled this on the “You” page by moving “Notifications” to be within “Preferences” as well. Since notifications moved to be under “Preferences” on the workspace screen, it would be confusing to portray it as a separate option on the “You” page. Additionally, it would maintain consistency to nest “Notifications” within the “Preferences” module on both screens.
You may be asking, isn’t it counterintuitive to remove “Notifications”? Doesn’t that make it less visible and harder to find? Usually, I would agree, but users expressed they rarely visit the “You” page compared to the workspaces screen. One interviewee even completely missed “Notifications” on the “You” page and went straight to “Preferences” when searching for notifications.
3. Channel Notifications
As recounted by users, it’s easy to forget to review and update their notifications after joining or creating a channel. This can cause issues such as missing important messages. Currently, the user can review the channel’s notifications settings by pressing on the channel’s name or the “info” icon.
To make this process more convenient, I incorporated Slackbot to remind users of their default notifications when joining a channel. Slackbot is Slack’s chatbot that welcomes the user into the workspace, sends reminders, and helps answer questions. In my experience, Slackbot has always been terrific in sending me reminders. I thought it would be an optimal addition for reminding users about channel notifications as well. I added options to either change their notifications settings, keep their notifications settings, or for Slackbot to not ask again. This way, the user is immediately notified of their default settings and can quickly change it.
When creating a new channel, I added the ability to set the channel’s notifications settings before the user can hit “Create.” This removes the extra step of going back and updating the channel’s notifications after creation, which users usually forget to do.
Final Thoughts
This was so much fun! I hope my redesigns lessen the confusion surrounding Slack’s mobile notifications. This was an incredibly rewarding design challenge, and I’m so glad I went through with it. I’m used to working in teams for end-to-end design projects, so I’m really proud of how I was able to identify problems through my research and use design thinking to solve them in my redesigns. In terms of future work, I would love to conduct user testing to validate my design decisions and continue iterating on my screens. Thank you to KPCB for this opportunity, and thank you for reading :).
Fun Fact: “Notification” was mentioned 60 times in this case study!
