Slack Hides Complexity to Create Effortless Onboarding

There are two things I believe to be true about Slack:

• The individual key flows feel effortless and simple.
• The cumulative experience feels noisy and distracting.

This isn't a contrarian view. In my study on noise, I mentioned how Slack themselves are experimenting with ways to make workspaces less overwhelming.

There's a possibility that by hiding some of these complexities, Slack have created an effortless onboarding process, that is doomed to become noisy.

To set the tone; Slack is a best-in-class product, and some of the following techniques you'll be able to replicate easily. 

But, it's important to discuss some of the trade-offs.

Slack's approach of incrementally exposing key interface sections during onboarding, is fantastic. It's absolutely something you should consider replicating.

But, they then fail to capitalise on the opportunity.

Here's an observation: this style of "point and show me" onboarding usually isn't very effective, but we (product builders) do it because it's easy.

Even worse, there's a bias towards a "rule of 3 or 5", so we end up with slides that lack any real purpose or immediate need.

On their third step though, Slack do something interesting to regain control of your attention: they ask for your input.

In this instance, it's customising a colour scheme, but it could be selecting any preference. It actually doesn't matter what it is (although it'll be more effective if it's something beneficial and worthwhile).

Like a distracted student being asked a direct question by a teacher, this technique shocks you into realising that you need to do something, or make a decision.

Slack have custom rules for specific email addresses.

For example, if you attempt to sign up using a common personal address, they'll prompt you that the experience is better when using your work email.

There aren't hundreds of these rules, I found five: @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, @outlook.com, @aol.com.

Even if you're not strictly a B2B tool, you can use this same process to warn users about obvious typos, before they sit and wait for a confirmation email that never arrives.

It's an easy task to put into your roadmap, which can help flows run more smoothly.

Imagine that you're the Head of Design at Tesla—which of these two input fields (specifically their placeholder text) feels the most comfortable?

I suspect it's even easier to recall other colleagues' email addresses, after looking at a visual cue like this.

Slack are great at these subtle nudges. 

Another example is that they take your email domain, and pre-fill the name of your workspace.

This isn't just a sensible default suggestion, but it instantly (and subconsciously) teaches you what workspaces are usually called.

i.e., it removes the expectation (or decision) that you might need to sit and ponder on a creative or unique name, like "Team Rocket". 

You can just use the name of your business.

And really, that's what Slack are trying to achieve with the techniques above; avoiding 🛌🏽 Decision Fatigue.

But ultimately, it's plausible that the lack of decision-making or context during the onboarding, encourages a lawless workspace, that isn't particularly organised, where channels "just exist" without any policing or accountability.

Anecdotally, I've never met anyone who's proud of their Slack workspace organisation.