Slack’s jarring new design – can you go back to the old one?

The only real issue I have is unfortunately a dealbreaker for me.

Right now I can see at a glance all of my workspaces and if any have a notification. I use a lot of workspaces and use this to see if any need attention.

With the new UI the only way to see this is to hover over the workspace icon. What used to be an unconscious visual scan now must be a conscious action.

Another cycle? I've seen it so many times. Designers and front end devs need to do something so they refresh the UI every few years to justify their existence. Thanks to SaaS we now have no choice if/when we upgrade.

Ummm how do you know what Slack workspace you're in?

Use case: I'm in #general. Can I ask a clarifying question about $DAYJOB's (currently private) Q4 plans... or did I accidentally leak that private information because no I'm _actually_ in the #general for _Javascript Geniuses Slacking Together_ community?

Overall I think the new design is fine - the biggest gripe is the colour themes which seem to mostly hark back to Windows Vista / 7 aero vibes at the expense of contrast and ease of reading.

We had the era of Slack-like interface, now it's time for Teams-like interface.

Outlook recently changed it and I absolutely hated it. Took me a good 2 weeks to get used to it. I was used to clicking on the bottom to open my calendar, now everything moved and I look everywhere BUT the left sidebar which was recently added. And, to make things worse, the icon is not your traditional calendar icon and you don't get a tooltip saying it'll open your Calendar when you hover over it.

I disliked Teams' interface for this and now I hate it even more because this seems to be the new shitty trend UX is going to.

All these apps constantly redesigning themselves makes me long for the days when everything was disconnected and you had to make a conscious choice to upgrade or not by installing from a bunch of floppies. Imagine a world where the automakers could break into your garage any time, without warning, and replace your steering wheel with a little joystick, new buttons in the ceiling instead of footpedals. No-one would tolerate that shit. Would they????

There was a brief, glorious period when SaaS and mobile apps made our lives better. Now it's just a rollercoaster of stress caused by corporate ADHD and non-stop enshittification.

I'm not one to say any system is ever perfect. But what are they trying to fix? The slack UI is overall pretty decent, and this looks like an iterative step back, judging from the comments about multiple workspaces.

I seriously do not understand why Slack decided to have workspace level design settings. I use 6 workspaces of which 2 have decided to switch. Now this mixed up workflow is driving me insane.

The design switch should be on app level. I rarely say this, but this is just retarded. Multi-workspace workflow is a core use-case in Slack.

All things considered, I like the new design. There are some nice features, like the activity tab being a more sane way to view unreads than previously available. I'm also a sucker for the new custom theming support. It's also nice to see slack workflows/automations being more discoverable. I was starting to get concerned that this feature would be canned.

Not knowing which workspace has notifications at a quick glance is a huge pain though.

Will this affect the web UI?

I have been a holdout on the desktop app and just have two different workspaces opened in two different tabs in a dedicated Firefox profile. As far as I can remember, some minor UI changes may have appeared in one workspace days or weeks ahead of the other.

Frankly, I wasn't barely aware that there was a multi-workspace Slack UI... I've seen the add/switch workspace menu but never used it.

After an hour or so I got pretty used to it. The "Home" view is almost identical to how the whole app used to be. The other views just give different ways to view DMs, messages marked for later, etc.

The one that pissed me off was moving workflows to the top of the screen rather than having them in the chat box. The org I work for uses a lot of them, and they're all hidden behind a small button that takes me out of the flow trying to find it everyday

I’m calling it now. In five years there will be the next iteration of slack like tools. They will raise tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and be good for another 5-10 years before enshittification.

Time to start finding alternatives and betting.

My first thought seeing it yesterday was, wow this looks like an email client. Wide list of chats, message previews, folders and workspaces, all tucked into an interface reminiscent of Outlook. The organizers have won. What’s next?

Lots and lots of scrolling up and down now. The glance view is not there anymore.

The lack of easy multi-workspace switching is annoying.

Why does that search bar look eerily similar to VSCode's redesigned one? They even have the arrows in the right place and everything.

What’s read and unread? The unread counts don’t seem to update for me without quite some delay or a tab change. Confusing.

TIL PC Pro Magazine is too cheap to get a pro Slack subscription