Discussion
Slack is fascinating to me because it was originally a huge hit as an additional communication tool to email.
However it has clearly accumulated a lot of cruft and seems to lack any coherent product or design strategy which has led to a poor user experience.
This image from @mcc is a great example.
@carnage4life @mcc Interesting! The "TODOs" feature is my favorite in the whole app. It lets you save a message for later, and check it off when you've completed it. The "Moon" icon is not actually dark mode (which is what I thought it was too!!!) -- it's a "do not disturb" mode that mutes some notifications when you want to focus.
@carnage4life @mcc Worth noting that the moon icon is not a dark mode switch but to enable "focus mode". Why? Nobody knows.
@akos @carnage4life @mcc Macos uses the same icon the same way.
Yes, I did in fact misinterpret it as "sleep" and then spend more than a week trying to figure out why the heck none of my notifications were going through on my work macbook, why do you ask.
@whbboyd @akos @carnage4life so focus is do not disturb? Okay, I guess
@carnage4life @mcc It's not exactly a unique pattern, seems like all my regular-use apps are studded with things I don't use and in some cases don't understand what they are. Many but not all pushing the AI string. An artifact of PDD, promotion-driven development.
@carnage4life @mcc good luck searching for anything also. What a turd. I have to use it everyday and have designed a ton of bots for it which is equally as messy and convoluted. But it’s 1000000% better than Microsoft Teams.
@carnage4life @mcc I can’t find anything in Slack. It is such a mess.
@carnage4life #AltText #Alt4You
Slack's left-hand menu, with buttons marked up in red text:
"Slackbot" - Will never click, and also resent
"Home" - Normal
"DMs" and "Activity" - Normal, but not certain why there are two
"Files" - Have never clicked; probably will never click
"To-dos" - Will never click
"Agents & tools" - Will never click, and also resent
"Plus button" - Don't know what this does. If I hover, says "Create new" (Don't know what that means and don't care)
1/2
FWIW, while you can't get rid of Slackbot, you can rearrange the icons so that the AI shit is at the bottom, then resize the window so that they disappear int the "More ..." panel.
@carnage4life @mcc Have to use Slack at my job. I liken it to social media for (bad) business. Issues, specs, requests, it's all posted to this chaotic flood of information (and nowhere else). So I actually use Slackbot to slackmine needles from this ridiculous haystack and Files > Lists to track them. That is, if I don't choose to ignore and just let them drift away down feed never to be seen again. From an employee perspective, that's kind of a feature. Right? 🙄