Introducing a simpler, more organized Slack

That’s a fundamental shift away from the silos of email and toward channel-based messaging. The average paid user spends more than nine hours each workday connected to Slack, including around 90 minutes of active use. That adds up to more than 5 billion actions taken each week in Slack, from solving customer support tickets to keeping tabs on the latest sales deal.

Every person on every team—centrally located or remote, technical or not—should be able to take advantage of the platform and collaborate together. That’s why we’re releasing a simpler, more organized experience for our users. The rollout starts today and will continue over the next several weeks (with a complementary mobile version to follow). When it arrives, you’ll be able to:

• Navigate channels and search across your organization with a new navigation bar
• Discover key conversations, files, apps and more—all at the top of your sidebar
• Start a message from anywhere with a handy new compose button
• Organize channels, messages and apps into custom, collapsible sections (you know, like folders)
• Take swift action with your apps through shortcuts. Hasta la vista, context switching.

Altogether, these improvements make it easier for anyone to use Slack, adapt it to how they work and access essential tools. March on for the finer details, then hop over to our Help Center for more info on what’s new.

Easier to use

Let’s start from the top. The first thing you’ll notice is the new navigation bar, which makes it much quicker to search Slack and toggle between your recent conversations. No fancy keystrokes required.

You’ll also notice key information now stored neatly atop your sidebar. Mentions, reactions to your messages, files, people and apps are all right there for the easiest of referencing.

When you’re ready to start a new conversation, you can now do so using an all-new compose button. It’s a convenient way to begin drafting a message, before deciding the person or channel you’ll send it to. If your attention is needed elsewhere, your draft will be saved for you to come back to whenever you’re ready.

Adaptable to how you work

As your team moves more work into Slack, you’ll likely find yourself in more channels—some of which you practically live in, others that you simply check in passing. With this new experience, users on paid plans will be able to organize their channels, direct messages and apps into customizable sections within their sidebar. Boom. Now you can prioritize what deserves your attention.

Name your sections as you see fit (emoji included), drag and drop any channel and conversation inside, and order those sections according to how you work best. For example, a few high-priority conversations could fit under an “☎️Urgent ” section that sits atop your list.

Essential tools, at your fingertips

Slack integrates with all the essential work tools organizations rely on. And we’re making it far easier to discover and use those tools, without the need to switch between multiple windows and tabs. Instead, you’ll just click shortcuts—a new lightning bolt icon next to the message input field—and kick off work with an app. Pretty nifty, right?

In the coming weeks, you’ll see more of your favorite apps for Slack become accessible through shortcuts. These make it easy to:

• Make collaborative decisions with Simple Poll (shown above)
• Start a meeting with Cisco WebEx Meetings
• Create a customer support ticket with Freshdesk

And many more app shortcuts are still to come. The shortcuts menu is also a home for built-in Slack features such as reminders, calls and beginning custom workflows with Workflow Builder, a visual tool that allows any Slack user to automate routine processes.

And one more thing…🙏

Thank you. We partnered closely with our customers to co-develop all of these improvements—creating shared channels so our pilot customers could share their thoughts directly with our product team in real time. Each of you, along with anyone who’s ever written to us with feedback and suggestions, has helped shape this new Slack experience.

Learn more about how this undertaking came together in our design blog.