Read on Twitter
This is the last tweet from @SlackHQ about a feature that I worked on as I'll be leaving next week. After more than 5 years there, it's with a lot of emotions that I look back at all the projects that I had the privilege to work on and ship.
Hop on this nostalgic thread with me⊠https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1273707562643283968
Hop on this nostalgic thread with me⊠https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1273707562643283968
About a month after joining Slack, we released my first feature: Shouty Rooster! I made this illustration to go along a warning before notifying an entire channel. I'll always remember Stewart's comment: "Leave it to a Frenchman to add a cock to the UI"
https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/561323395204542464
https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/561323395204542464
Not long after, we shipped a feature that was huge at the time: the ability to jump from a search result to the original message in the conversation. Before that, you had to go on a webpage outside of Slack to view it. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/575447930028474368
Side note: at the time, it was up to each designer to create the little animation that we would attach to each tweet, so I had to make all of those, which explain how inconsistent they were⊠(sorry!)
As I was mostly working on our icon family at the time, we took some time to have fun with it. This is a pure design detail that helps or hurt nobody, but brings a nice subtle touch of character to an interface 
https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/614206619992387584
https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/614206619992387584
I was already very mindful about accessibility at the time, and since we were making our own icons, we managed to ship our first few accessibility improvements, including the new online indicator. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/635950936301502464
This was quickly followed by another accessibility improvement for colour blindness. People that needs this are always so happy when they discover it (it's in your theme list as an option) https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/649650105105051648
Looking back at all the things we did before 2017, everything was so fast. We though about a feature, designed it, built it, shipped it, all of this in a matter of hours sometimes. I miss that.
Same month, and boom, we shipped Group conversations, which was sometimes called Multiparty DMs at the time, and many older Slack employees still call them that. What a terrible name that was! https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/659157979321597952
2015 is not even over, and I'm shipping another feature that is still live today: message actions. This feature was one of the many little things we had to build in order to support larger features that we had in mind⊠like Threads. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/664973373210886144
Note: I think Stephen eventually watched a Star Wars movie since then 
Do you know about compact mode? Most people don't! It was the original way slack messages were displayed, and back in 2015 I had to work on a little design refresh as it was really starting to be left behind. I don't believe it changed much since then. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/664983536428953600
Another small feature: sharing messages. Before that, you had to right-click on the timestamp of a message to copy the link to it, in order to share it in another channel. Now there's a button. And yes, it was difficult, because reasons. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/732991930288775171
And here's the second most difficult feature I had to work while at Slack: All Unreads. Most people don't know about it, but that's the only way I can use Slack now. The real superheroes for this features are the engineers, it was quite a challenge! https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/776108054932697088
I didn't actually work on the Giphy update, but I did made this GIF, and I'm not sure why but this is probably my favourite. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/804451957729476609
Now here's where things took a turn for me. I switched teams and landed in one of the best teams I ever worked with: the Calls team. I took over designing the calling experience in Slack and stayed there until 2019. It was the best. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/808753542789939200
Ok, hands down, the most difficult feature I ever worked on. Threads. Fuck. That was HARD. 2 years of work.
Huge learning experience. I still see this as the end of Slack the startup, and the beginning of Slack, the Enterprise grade product. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/821779766575439872
Huge learning experience. I still see this as the end of Slack the startup, and the beginning of Slack, the Enterprise grade product. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/821779766575439872
After Threads, I had to take a breath mentally, and I was lucky to have the opportunity to work on a small feature that ended being such a fun little addition to Slack: Custom Statuses! https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/852552533658681344
There's so many little things that are hidden in the Tweet animations that I made for my features. For example, "Pure Magic Inc" is a friend's company, a kitesurfing school in Dublin : https://puremagic.ie/
And Bobson Dugnutt is a name from a hilarious Baseball video game where some Japanese engineers had to come up with American-sounding names. I still have the list available at all time to use in fake mock ups. https://twitter.com/lrgmnn/status/813635533658144768
I'd like to also point out that @annapickard's replies to each one of those tweet should be printed and exposed in a museum. https://twitter.com/annapickard/status/852595300988370944
Then, I guess we got bored or something, so we redesigned Calls a bit. It's still almost the same, 3 years later! https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/854456031438438400
And boom, screen sharing, in Calls! This was surprisingly tricky to design. Still not 100% happy with it⊠I wish I could have redesigned it since then. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/864528371312500737
We're only 3 years in, but don't worry, I shipped waaaayyy less things in the last two years.
I started to *really* care about accessibility at the time, and I managed to get myself added to the Accessibility team in Slack. Our first public feature was to improve the keyboard experience in Slack. We used a very intense focus ring at the time. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/886994844958076928
In some rare occasions, an engineer comes up with a great idea, contacts a designer, and they both jam on it secretly for a while. If they're lucky, their work gets to go live. That's what happened with the image viewer in Slack, just 2 people, jamming. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/999750788929945602
Dark Mode.
We had a bot that posted all the feature request we received about Dark Mode in a channel, and there was easily over 10 messages every day. It took forever to review all those messages to figure out how to design it. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1172165133956603904
We had a bot that posted all the feature request we received about Dark Mode in a channel, and there was easily over 10 messages every day. It took forever to review all those messages to figure out how to design it. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1172165133956603904
Huuuuuuge kuddos to our world class Customer Experience team. They replied to hundreds of tweet or support request about dark mode, dating back years prior. I was so impressed by such a level of dedication, nothing could make me prouder to work along such amazing people.
I'm skipping so many things, I had the chance to work on so many aspects of Slack, it was just amazing to witness such an amazing growth, and see a small company become so mature and solid.
In the last two years, I almost exclusively focused on Design Systems, Accessibility, and Platform. I didn't get to ship many visible features while doing that, but I had the privilege to build new process for our design team so we could improve accessibility all around.
What a ride that was. I'm the luckiest for sure. There's no way any other designer could be luckier than me.
