Preface: This design challenge is part of the KPCB Design Fellows application. I am not a designer at Slack.

The Problem

Slack lets teams of any size communicate in ways that email never allowed for, boosting their productivity and helping them reach their goals faster. However, Slack doesn’t afford its users any way of visualising these goals or designating tasks to specific users and sub-teams. Existing task organisers such as Todoist and Trello have Slack Apps, but these are limited in functionality and still require the user to switch to the native apps to be productive. For example, the Todoist Slack App only allows users to create tasks. Additionally, both of these apps rely almost exclusively on text input which, while efficient for task creation, is not ideal for editing existing tasks.

I chose to design this feature for Slack as, in my role as a director of MHacks, I need to allocate tasks to over 30 people at a time across a variety of sub-teams. Our Logistics-UX team, for example, has 14 sub-teams each with their own set of tasks. As a result, we’ve had issues with clearly communicating responsibilities and tracking our progress towards our goals. We’ve used everything from Google Docs to Slack Posts to assign tasks to our members, but these have had limited success for a few reasons. First, neither is easily accessible from Slack at any time—even pinned Slack Posts get lost in the sea of information our Slack team encounters on the daily. Second, neither offers a convenient way to assign tasks to users. Third, they both lack any sort of notification or reminder system to help users stay on track, so it’s up to the user to continuously check on their deliverables.

MY Solution

My solution sits in the same space as channel information and user profiles—in a pane on the right of the Slack app. It’s a chronologically-ordered todo list specific to the current channel being displayed. This allows teams within an organisation to separate their responsibilities. Tasks can be added from this pane or from the Slack message field and can be assigned to individual users or user groups. Tasks can also be given due dates and times, which will appear to the right of each task and be colour-coded according to their proximity to the current date. Task creation will use natural language processing to parse the input and find due dates and times, and Slackbot will use this information to remind users of upcoming and overdue tasks.

Next Steps

I intentionally kept the task features minimal because I wanted to keep the barrier to entry of usability low, and because the limited real estate afforded by using Slack's right-pane means that an abundance of features could easily result in a cluttered interface. That being said, I’d love the opportunity to user-test this implementation and do research to gain an understanding of what features users desire the most. These features could include priority levels for tasks and sorting based on priority, for example.

Additionally, the current implementation is based on the way my various Slack teams set-up channels—by creating a new channel for each sub-team. As such, the task list is specific to each channel and clicking on a different channel will change the task list being displayed. Were a Slack team to set-up channels in a different way, this implementation wouldn't be ideal for them. This would be another user behaviour I'd like to test for or gather data on.