Slack gets interface makeover with dedicated DMs

Slack has had a major makeover, which includes a dedicated way to track direct message threads. Chief Product officer of the company, Noah Weiss, said the product had changed and was intended to reflect where Slack stands today.

“We’ve added a lot more tools and capabilities into the core Slack product that really has evolved from being a collaboration tool to a full-fledged productivity platform,” Weiss told TechCrunch.

With new tools additions and features, the interface was unable to keep up and reduced easy accessibility. Acknowledging the issue faced by large companies that had a number of employees, Slack made it easy to find DMs in one place.

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There is an additional Activity page that displays all the messages related to work, without the hassle to find it in a haystack. Items and tasks can be marked to come back to later, and will also be sectioned in the Later page. The More button will give access to canvases, workflows and integrated enterprise applications.

Users can also use magnifying glass icon for search and add a new message, canvas, huddle or channel from the + button.

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“There are 2500 apps in the Slack App Store, and all of your first-party tools, if you’re a large enterprise, get integrated into Slack and get combined with all of your conversations which happened in channels, and suddenly you’ve got this amazing knowledge repository that builds up naturally over time. A lot of these generative AI capabilities will allow you to then have a much more conversational approach to unlocking the knowledge that’s inside Slack,” Weiss said.

The changes in interface are being rolled out today but it may be a few months until users begin to see all the features.