This is a quick follow-up to the previous post about the website side of Slack, the team communication management tool. The screens above show the first time experience with its iPhone app counterpart.
The good bits:
- Once signed in, the app doesn’t force users to watch a product tour or present an overlay; instead, it gets them straight into the messaging area.
- If the team member that signed in has no team messages to view, the app leverages the blank slate area to provide inline information about Slack’s messaging channels.
To be improved:
- The app immediately throws up a sign-in wall. For new users, there is no context or sample functionality; it seems to assume that all users will have already visited the website. But, what if their first exposure to Slack was through this app, which could easily have happened if Apple featured it in the App Store?
- In order to find out that an invitation is required, users have to first type in an email address that Slack doesn’t recognize. At that point it offers to let the user create a team, but this action pushes them out of the app and onto Slack’s website in Safari, which points out that an invitation is needed first.
- I pointed out that heavy-handed messaging was an issue on the website, and it is amplified when viewed in these screenshots from the iPhone app. There are paragraphs of text that can make it difficult for new users to pick out important pieces of information.