The past few months have seen us use video conferencing and emails heavily in order to communicate with officemates and see our work in progress, as life goes on for most of us in the midst of a pandemic. Communication platforms built for businesses and projects are also in-demand and so we’re seeing a lot of them step up. Slack is the latest one to do so as they are now rolling out the changes they’ve been testing in beta with a redesigned app that is simpler and more intuitive for mobile users.
Having quick access to the most important tools in the app is crucial to a good user experience on an app. This new version of the Slack app has a tab bar at the bottom of the screen for easier access even when you’re browsing the app with one hand. The first tab is Home where you can find all your conversations. The channels and direct messages that have notifications are at the top of the list while the others are organized by section below.
The second tab is direct messages because previously, this was a bit hard to get to when on mobile. Now you’ll be able to find them on the 2nd tab on the app. Next to it is the Mentions tab where you will see in one place all the conversations that have tagged you as well as the reactions to your messages (sometimes, a reaction is in itself the message). The last tab is called You and it is where you can update your status or set yourself to away. You can also snooze notifications and get to your preferences easily.
The redesigned app also has quick gestures to make it easier to navigate. Swipe right from any screen to open a list of your workspaces and if you swipe left, you’ll go to your last conversation. Within a conversation, swipe right and you will get back to your last tab. You now also have a compose button on your screen to make it easier to start a conversation or send a message. In your DMs, you now have a call button so you can start a call quickly.
The Slack update has now started rolling out to users and should be completed over the next week. You can update from the app itself or from your Google Play Store.
