Emoji & Actions

One of the most iconic characteristics of Slack is our use of emoji in our feature sets. Emoji help our customers express their status and feelings, trigger complex flows and actions, and efficiently convey opinions and sentiment.

Shadow actions

I pitched and designed the idea of shadow actions during one of our hackathons at Slack. For other's messages, adding an emoji was the obvious action but for your own messages, I looked at the data and saw that people were frequently editing their messages on mobile but that action is only really relevant for your most recent message so it was a perfect fit for the transient nature of this feature.

Action sheets

The more features we built out on mobile, the more obvious it became that the native action sheets and dialogs just weren't as flexible as we wanted them to be; thus, the Slack Kit action sheet was born. I documented the behaviour and layouts and provided a number of design examples for where we could implement these kinds of flexible views, a number of them revolving around emoji. Check out the prototype from your laptop or phone! 👉Emoji tap prototype