Implementation looks really slick. Seems to get the job done without being over complicated. Wouldn't expect anything less from @stewart and the Slack team 👏🏾
I am THRILLED to see that Slack has finally come to their senses and integrated threaded conversations. This is a massive improvement of the user experience.
I belong to many Slack groups and I really, really struggle to actually return to the groups. My primary frustration has been that if I go to a group with say more than 5 people, it feels like a giant old Skype conversation between people. And because of the lack of threaded conversations, I was forced to scroll all the way back to the top and then piece together the actual conversations. Talk about a frustrating user experience.
I will say that I love using Slack one on one -- I use it with my virtual assistant and it works beautifully. But for multiple people, I just could not deal with it. I NEEDED the context that comes from threaded conversations.
This is why I've been spending more time with Facebook groups. Love it or hate it, Facebook has nailed the UX of their group discussions. I am truly able to follow conversations and the UX of both consuming of those conversations and contributing to those conversations is simple and seamless.
I am launching an online UX course soon (www.sarahdoody.com/uxresearch) and one component will be an online community. I was truly torn between using Facebook or Slack. I wanted the UX of Facebook's threaded conversations. But, I know that my audience would prefer to use Slack because they're already using it at work. So, looks like I'll end up going with Slack!!
I am SO happy for this feature. Thanks for listening to your users :)
This looks great, nice work Slack! Any Chatlio customers out there, we are interested in your thoughts on any potential uses for this in Chatlio. Again, nice job thinking through the UX Slack.
It's amazing to me how something so simple that has been available for ages with other messaging type apps can be so anticipated and appreciated (including myself). I'm curious what @stewart take on this is. Why did it take so long. Was it a cultural thing? Was it too close to FB comments for comfort?
Has this launched fully? I can't find 'start a thread'. I also wonder why they didn't just use a simple CTA like "reply" to 'start a thread'. It seems more natural to me.
As most of you, I'm excited to try it. I just wonder if the UI will be effective in getting colleagues to adopt it. I find, for example, that very few people use 'comments' when discussing files, which has a similar UI. They just type into the main chat box. It seems that there is some friction in using the right column, so I imagine conversations will be split between a 'thread' and separate replies. Nevertheless, I like how they have given users the option of a quick, lightweight, side conversation.
Another idea might be to support some text input way of linking messages, similar to "@ mentions", but maybe like "re:(thread name)". There is a design challenge to cleanly communicate and specify 'thread names' but could be an interesting power-user feature. I find myself already typing in "re:(blah)" when trying to discuss multiple things in a channel.
@rahulcap This only just rolled out for me today. I too would love to see some sort of custom naming feature to help contextualize threads (i.e., for those kinds of threads that may be recurring conversations versus one-off side chats)
@haoyangnz Actually after testing another org it only appeared for one of my teams and to get it in the desktop for that one org I had to restart slack.
We've explored a number of workarounds with bots or integrations, but native Slack thread support was the dream. Plus, it looks incredibly well executed 👍 Excited to start using it 😄
Replies
Startup TV
Text Case 2.0
Tettra
Postmates
The 1-Hour UI Audit
Chatlio
Muddy
Prkit.co
Assembly
Hitlist
Reacji Channeler
ChatSpot
LaunchPass
Devcenter