Slack, a team communication tool, which is quickly gaining popularity and reportedly drawing acquisition interest from a variety of companies, just launched a major update to its somewhat lackluster Android app.
The experience has been completely redesigned, and they’ve made efforts to speed it up to address a common complaint about slowness within the app.
The design has eliminated its left and right drawers and added a tabbed navigation in which tabs point usdrs to their channels, direct messages, starred items, and mentions. A “jump to” feature has been added to quickly go to any channel, group, or direct message, and teams can be elected from the top dropdown.
The notification experience has also been refined so that they’re now grouped by team, and there’s a new button in the bottom right corner of the channels list that lets you quickly locate or create channels, DMs, or groups.
Full *message* _formatting_ is now supported, and the app will now respect users’ emoji preferences as set on the web.
On top of all of this, Slack has improved its search functionality with the ability to open search results in a new “archive viewer” so users can see the full context of a message result. The Slack team says in a blog post:
We’ve heard your feedback regarding the slowness of switching channels, switching teams, and generally navigating around the app. This is our first release to offer substantially better experience when you’re not connected — all the messages that loaded last time you were connected can be read, and you can move much faster from place to place. It’s a bit better now, but it will be even better in the future. Promise.
We’ve also taken a cue from Google’s Material Design guidelines and updated the app accordingly: New icons, some new transitions, and a generally more pleasant experience on most devices.
With the new update, Slack says it has rewrote the app from the ground up in a way that will enable it to launch more features and quicker updates more easily in the future.
According to a recent report from Business Insider, Slack has 750,000 daily active users with 200,000 paid members, and is worth over $2.8 billion.
Image via Slack