Mobile Exploration

Visual voice messages

One of the biggest takeaways from my research trip to Brazil was that "working at a desk" is quickly becoming the minority use case, especially as we expand into emerging markets. WhatsApp is the unofficial work app that many employees gravitate towards for work communication, and one of the most popular features is voice messages. I immediately came back to Slack and specced out an idea for visual voice messages – voice recorded messages that capitalize on some exploratory transcription work that the calls team was looking into.

Infinite scroll

Years ago we created a feature for desktop called All Unreads that essentially presented every new message in one long running list. They tried to adapt this feature to mobile for months and eventually scrapped it, but I pitched an alternative that could solve the same problem. Infinite scrolling is built off of the mobile unread section, so that if you tap into an unread channel you can get to the bottom and pull up to snap-scroll into your next unread conversation. Check out the prototype from your laptop or phone!
👉 Infinite scroll prototype

Mention jumping

Mention jumping is something we've been chatting about for years because it's always so clumsy going into an unread channel and then trying to hunt down the relevant place where you've been mentioned. This idea is far from perfect and uncovers more issues than solutions, but in just 20 minutes it was fun to lightly explore the concept and put it into people's hands. Check out the prototype from your laptop or phone!
👉 Mention jumping prototype