The brainchild of Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, Slack has risen to become the web's most popular corporate chat client.
In a crowded space and seemingly saturated market, Slack has become a cult hit. It's beloved for its gorgeous, bubbly interface and tons of delightful little interactions throughout the app.
We were there from the start. Stewart and his team came to us when Slack was a rough, unstyled prototype, and we worked with them to design the app from the ground up. The brand, the web app, the mobile app, and even the marketing site—the works.
We strived to add chock full of fun little interactions to the product. The logo animates in a burst of colors as it loads; modals slide down from the top of the screen; changing teams flips the screen around like a deck of cards.
Throughout the entire product, everything seems to playfully jump around and pop off the screen. Each of these interactions is designed not only to help the user understand what’s going on, but put a little smile on their face.
We gave it the color scheme of a video game, not an enterprise collaboration product.
In Slack, every piece of copy is seen as an opportunity to be playful. Where a competitor might just have a loading spinner, Slack has funny quotes like, “Need to whip up a dessert in a hurry? Dump a bag of oreos on the floor and eat the oreos off the floor like an animal.” A strange little injection of fun into an otherwise boring day.
Slack acts like your wise-cracking robot sidekick, instead of the boring enterprise chat tool it would otherwise be. Like Interstellar’s TARS, compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL9000.
The design and features of Slack are known for propelling it to become the fastest growing business application ever at a current valuation of over $7 billion dollars.
Never before have we witnessed so much user love for an enterprise software platform.