What's so objectionable about the new UI?
previously all workspaces appeared in a single column so you could see at a glance which workspaces had updates and could prioritize work accordingly. This allows for passively staying up to date.
Now all workspaces are collapsed under a single icon. So you see a single “update” but can’t see which workspace without interacting with the app. Now looking for updates is an active process.
This doesn’t even save space since the sidebar is still always there, and now there’s just more white space.
I’m in ~10 workspaces for vendors and developer communities that I need to be involved in as part of my job. This has absolutely tanked any sense of productivity. I can no longer see what’s happening at a glance.
Additionally they’ve made it so replies in threads are the same notification badge level as a DM. Previously it was white, now it’s red. So not only did they make it hard to see what workspace has a DM, I can’t actually tell if something is a DM or not.
This happens in every redesign. People push back and claw their way to use the old design, eventually it becomes completely inaccessible. Three years later and the same people will complain about the next redesign again.
Like yeah, enshitification gets normalized and you learn to live with it. But that doesn’t mean it’s fine either.
Slacks done redesigns before that were well received because it didn’t affect its functionality in the workplace. This does.
In slacks new product vision, you don’t sign into multiple workspaces, you sign into your “home” workspace and get invited via Slack Connect to other workspaces.
This seems to be reinforced by collapsing the workspace picker and making unreads in other workspaces less obvious.
Managing them in a single app was fine because it kept them distinct. Their new vision is directly at odds with real world professional use
But from a revenue perspective in 2023, it is a mistake. Of your list, which of work, vendor, and personal likely is a paid account? I’d argue in 2023 they only care about work and vendor and that is what they are optimizing their experience for at present. Now that adoption has saturated and the curve has flattened, the strategy of personal or even open source workspaces has served its purpose.
In short, now that they’ve got their hooks in, I’m sure they’d be happy for the personal workspaces go elsewhere, leaving just the paying professional context, and single login login, interacting with vendor/partner contexts.