You can navigate back and forth within Slack using the new navigation bar, so you can quickly flick between channels and DMs. You’ll even be able to customize the width of the sidebar and tweak its color with 11 new themes soon.Ī new top navigation bar also helps with search in Slack and lets you switch between channels and search. Both were buried away before, and you’ll now be able to quickly see mentions or channel pings, and find people you want to DM. There’s a new section in the sidebar for People and Mentions & reactions. Searching for people or channels and reacting to threads and mentions has always been a little clunky in Slack, but that’s also greatly improved now. You can start drafting a message as a DM or straight into a Slack channel, and Slack will load in the relevant message history within the draft view before you hit send. There’s also a big new compose button in the sidebar that works as a universal way to start a message anywhere in Slack.
Unfortunately, the new sidebar sections feature will only be available on paid Slack plans, not free versions.
That means if you’re working on a project that has certain channels and group DM conversations, then you can nest them all under one handy section and drag and drop it to exactly where you want it in the sidebar. The biggest change is that messages, channels, and apps will all now support grouping into collapsible sections within the Slack sidebar. Slack’s new redesign all starts with the sidebar. That was very much the goal of this process.” “We’ve taken a lot of the historical features and reorganized them in a way that makes them much more apparent in the right way and simple to use. “This is the largest redesign in Slack’s history,” explains Ethan Eismann, vice president of design at Slack, in an interview with The Verge.
Slack is trying to address some of these flaws with far better sidebar customization, a new compose button, a top navigation bar, and many other tweaks and changes.
If you’re a Slack user, you’re probably used to some of the quirky ways the chat app works and how parts of the user interface are hard to discover and customize. Slack is unveiling a big redesign to its communications app that starts rolling out today to make things a lot simpler to use.