Slack’s new Tinder feature: a review
The user psychology of the swipe
Slack, despite being 15 years old this year, continues to grow at an impressive rate.
After being acquired by Salesforce in a $27.7 billion ‘megadeal’ in 2021, paid customers were up 39% year on year in 2022. Not to mention, power payers were up 45% (customers paying more than $1 million per year).
What’s more, Slack has a net dollar retention rate of 122%…
This means that if someone pays $100 in year one, they will pay $122 the next year. Be it through adding more users, upgrading plans, other upsells.
This growth is largely down to the way the business is built, using strong network effects and a product-led growth pricing model:
Slack allows users in for free, gets them to invite their team, then ultimately motivates them to pay when people can’t see old messages (realising they should have documented better in the first place).
Hence their explosive and sustainable growth over the years.
But it’s not all good. Personally, I’ve had a bumpy road with Slack over the past four years.
Slack started as a saviour at work, so much cleaner than any email UI I’d used before.
But it has now become the bane of my life.
I have 101 Slack channels across 8 workspaces, and that’s not including DMs. Every day there’s SO many red dots for the tidal wave of unread messages. It’s distracting. It’s stressful.
Ironically their slogan is: the productivity platform.
Far from it. It feels like The Distract Platform sometimes.
Helping people to focus whilst also allowing them to stay on top of what’s going on is the biggest challenge for Slack. And it’s a really hard challenge to solve.
Which is why I was interested to see their new feature: Catch Up.
I was on Slack mobile a few weeks back catching up on my messages, when I saw a pop up directing me to a new tutorial for their swiping feature.
At first I thought:
What?! Is Slack turning into Tinder? Oh dear.
But then I tried it and started to change my mind….
Let’s dig into to why I think this can work really well, the UI, the navigation, some interesting AB tests and the user psychology of the swipe in more detail.
First stop, a nice lil’ tutorial.
Bish bash bosh: a simple & effective tutorial
My first impressions was that the tutorial UI is clean and tidy, without much copy. I liked how easy it was to read and get through — some tutorials actually increase time to value; there’s a fine line with how long your tutorial should be, and how many screens you slot in before the magic moment.
Slack played it just right in my view.
The value proposition on screen one was:
Breeze through your unreads
Swipe your way through unread channels, DMs and mentions
To me, there’s a few value propositions I think could be even more compelling that hit those deeper emotions of work anxiety, FOMO, being ‘on it’, like:
Never miss an important message again
Stay on top of your unreads
Or even:
Get rid of that red dot
Interested to see how they keep testing and refining this messaging over time.
Onto the second screen, I was told how to swipe: left to mark as read. With the option to also tap instead of swipe.
Slide three tells me to swipe left to keep unread, to come back later if there’s an action.
The biggest thing that sticks out for me is the time to Magic Moment, also known as the Ah Ha moment. I’m able to swipe on an unread within 3 screens. Super quick.
When we look at the time to magic moment for the other swiping products — Tinder & Bumble — Slack’s swiping tutorial is two screens longer. Meaning a slightly longer time to magic moment.
In the grand scheme of things, all are pretty quick. And for Slack, users need to take time before deciding read or unread — the consequences are higher than a missed match on the dating apps.
Perhaps a longer tutorial slows users down out of the fast swiping habit. Which could train people to take their time instead of furiously swiping like people do on Tinder.
As a returning user, the experience is similar.
When swiping on Slack, a thought came to mind:
The psychology of the swipe is so so popular for dating, but why hasn’t it caught on elsewhere?
At least from what I’ve seen, swiping is more popular in B2C. Specifically dating. I’ve yet to see it catch on in B2B or other B2C spheres.
So, I did a bit of research into the swipe what it does to the brain reward system, the role it plays in habit formation and addiction.
The user psychology of the swipe
First, what is a swipe? What defines the action itself? It’s not a flick. It’s not a scroll. It’s a swipe.
According to Google’s Material Design System a swipe is a sliding action to reach a certain threshold. Like swiping the top card off a deck of cards.
There’s a range of reasons a swipe is different (and better in some cases) than a scroll for deciding between two options (yay or nay):
👉 It’s faster: swiping is a much faster motion than tapping a button, helping us time-poor professionals speed through.
👉 It reduces the Paradox of Choice: given Slack chooses the order in which to show your unreads, there’s no picking which channel to go to first making it easier on the brain.
👉 It is convenient: users prefer not to have to stretch their thumbs or readjust their grip in order to execute a function. So the swipe is SUPER easy.
👉 It feels good to reject: marking a message read is like a rejection — it feels good. Like checking off a list, you get that dopamine hit.
👉 It creates a variable reward, since people don’t know what Slack message they’ll get next — similar to a casino slot machine — you just want to keep going and going and going and going and going to find out whats next.
A a study on the brains of drug addicts looked at the role of dopamine in addiction, and found that waiting for the drug — that expectation and excitement — caused more release of dopamine (the feel-good neurotransmitter) then the drug itself.
So, waiting for that next Slack message is more addictive than reading the message when it comes. That sounds about right in my experience of the red dots and pings of Slack.
Me: tentatively waiting for the next message to show that I’m needed…
(But realistically knowing that I need to get on with my work instead of waiting for the next ping.)
Most importantly for me, this new Catch Up feature makes me less stressed about missing something key. It is easier than setting 100s of reminders (my current habit on Slack).
It is an intentional space to be distracted, get on top of things, then log off and focus.
And with that, comes an important aspect: where Slack have put this intentional space within the wider navigation.
Navigation, navigation, where for art thou in the navigation…
In terms of Navigation, catch up is in prime position at the top of the side pane. Right under search and one of the first things your eyes rest on — in an even higher position than threads.
I also noticed a lil’ AB test when looking through my different workspaces:
- A carousel of square card-like modules
- The normal Mental Model of channel-like sections in a list
And funnily, at first I didn’t have Catch Up for all my workspaces, just two. Perhaps an AB test or perhaps my workspaces fall into different cohorts that require different UIs.
Now however, it has been rolled out across more. Which means I can now rest easy, no more feeling a bit lost as someone isn’t moving my things around all the time.
In summary
Do I like it?
Yes
Do I use it?
Not always.
To summarise why this is the case, here’s my top pros and cons for Slack’s new Catch Up:
Pros
It’s fun, its fast, it works. It makes me feel less stressed about missing messages. Makes me feel on top of my work. Gives me that oh-so-nice dopamine hit.
Cons
It is only a mobile feature. I try not to use on Slack on mobile too much. I feel like I’m more likely to miss something on my mobile, so I do work on desktop where I feel less claustrophobic.
If I’m glued to Slack on my phone I take this as a negative sign that I’m anxious about work, I’m not prioritising rest and health, or that perhaps I’m working with a team that expects me to be ‘always on’. There will always be more messages. There will always be red dots. For me its about a wider problem in life of focus, clarity, values and how I want to work. Not something a feature will fix.
Have you tried it yet? Let me know what you think in the comments
