Slack has recently rolled out a new UI/UX update aimed at “enhancing user experience and productivity” (official slack release). While innovation is always welcome, it's equally important to understand how these changes are received by the actual user - and oh my - some of these changes feel weird and honestly I didn't even know I needed them.
So, let’s break some of these changes down:
Merged Workspaces
Merged workspaces feel a little bit “nesty”. If you have a notification from another workspace (personally I am a member on 5-6 slack channels), you have to click on the nested workspaces and then find the correct workspace to navigate to. I woke up having ~25 notification and the UI displayed them on instacar slack workspace and almost had a heart attack, throught that something critical was happening.
You have to do more clicks and scan all workspaces for new messages and mentions, which is kind absurd, even if you don’t have to click and workspaces are displayed on hover action. Also, you cannot ungroup them if you want.
Colours
Colors changed to gradient, which personaly I don’t like aesthetically. However, it’s not only the looks but the functionality as well. In “light” mode, no matter how much you customize it left slack bar cannot change to “white” and everything seems blur and hard to read, basically that’s a contrast problem. Aubergine - black is my go to for now, but honestly old slack colors seemed sharp and minimal.
Slack update takes some serious hit at the moment and it’s even a petition to revert the changes! If you check reddit /slack page then you can easily find more disfanctinal changes with this update.
It would be interesting to have actual data on competitors to slack (like microsoft teams) from the rollout day and so on.