🔊 Turning up the volume on what matters most

Noise impacts our users’ productivity and our customers’ profitability. A noisy experience of Slack has a greater impact on NPS than nearly any other attribute. VIPs cuts through the noise in Slack, surfacing what matters most in a seamless, lightweight way.

The unique design challenge with VIPs was to make the feature almost invisible until you set it up. How might we help people dial up the volume of some Slack conversations in a way that is simple and doesn’t add more noise? Prototyping for different visibility models helped us arrived the most appropriate and ergonomic form factor: DMs and mentions from VIPs simply get elevated to the top of the Slack sidebar (in Home and other tabs) when unread.

Rapid testing and research made it clear that, for feature comprehension and adoption, it was critical that users understood VIPs as a notification feature—not an organizational one. Every aspect of the feature—including setup, entry points and nudges—reinforces this distinction.

VIPs launched to GA in late November 2024. It quickly exceeded adoption expectations, reaching 500K WAU in December and 1M WAU by January 3, 2025. Notably, 23% of users who set up VIPs did so without receiving any educational introduction. We’re continuing to build on this insight: even users in less noisy Slack teams find value in the VIP feature, suggesting that its core functionality addresses a fundamental user need.

Project: Activity | Role: Lead Designer | Launched: 2023

📢 A centralized place to catch up in Slack

By 2023, incoming activity in the Slack sidebar had become fragmented, overwhelming, and a constant source of distraction. The new Activity tab—designed as part of Slack’s updated information architecture—offers a single, focused surface to help users stay on top of important messages that need their attention or response.

Unlike email, where each entry is uniform, Slack surfaces multiple types of entries that must be presented at the same level—yet clearly differentiated. This system prioritizes the message author and content, while also surfacing key metadata to help users assess the importance of each message.

The Slack interface is extremely information-dense, so navigation within the Activity tab had to be simple and intuitive. The read/unread status is prioritized above all other controls, and filters are fully exposed to maximize usability.

Since activity comes in throughout the day, a quick peek into the Activity tab—regardless of which tab the user is in—helps them stay aware of what’s new and decide whether it’s worth switching context.

The new activity tab was launched in Aug 2023 as part of Slack’s IA overhaul. It is currently the #3 most popular tab, followed only by Home and DMs. with over 13 million humans who rely on it each week.

Project: Canvas | Role: Design Director | Launched: 2022

A new editor surface, in Slack

I led the design of the new Canvas editor pilot in Slack (bringing Quip into Slack at Salesforce), including visioning, cross-functional leadership, and creative direction for a team of five designers and copywriters.

Starting with positioning canvas as the missing link to help users organize information in Slack—giving them much-needed access to data, charts, text, tasks, internal and external links, videos, and more—all in one place and free from the chronological constraints of channel conversations.

As a team lead, my role included providing clear onboarding guidance on process, culture, and expectations for the new design, product, and engineering teams coming from Quip; identifying and prioritizing key focus areas; codifying design initiatives; and laying the long-term foundation for architecture decisions related to integrating the editor into Slack.

As an IC in the team, I also was responsible for the interface design of the canvas browser and the editor history pane. The final version of the browser distilled the experience to a simple fundamental set of controls and set the long term foundation for other Slack surfaces, including Lists (Slack spreadsheets). The new editor history controls replaced Quip's legacy history system and brought Canvas in line with competitor capabilities.