Slack announced this Wednesday on its official blog the inclusion of threaded messaging, fulfilling the request of its users, whose major complaint was the inability for them to start conversations about particular subjects inside a chat without creating a new app channel.
The innovation is now available in Slack for the web, desktop, or mobile. Even when this addition is not original, it is projected to work better for Slack than the same feature in some of its competitors like Convo.
In the official blog post from the company, they explain that every message can be attached with one thread. To create a thread message, the user has to click the options bar that appears when hovering over the selected message, where the user can also add a reaction emoji or share the content of the message with other person or channel.
When clicking on the chat bubble, a flexible panel will appear on the right side of the application, and the user has created its own thread. In this new panel, the person will send the thread message to the user that first posted the initial message and be able to include more users in the threaded conversation.
Slack team members says that the experience has been improved
According to Paul Rosania, it is complicated for a person to keep abreast of 4 ongoing conversations in the same channel at the same time. He says that the addition of threaded discussions will allow participants to maintain the conversation regarding several topics at the same time without affecting the chat channel itself.
One of the most amusing inclusions regarding this new feature has to do with the fact that the threaded conversations can be shareable with people once they are finished. For example, if a group of workers has just decided where they are having a meeting, they just have to publish the threaded conversation in the selected channel.
Joshua Goldenberg, Slack’s head of design, told The Verge that this innovation it’s not meant to substitute the existing channels in the application. In fact, the objective is to complement them and make them more efficient than they already are.
Slack representatives have recommended users to utilize the thread tool for subjects that should not be ignored. This could translate into workers spending more time within the application since, according to research done last year, in average, people used Slack for over 10 hours a day.
April Underwood, Slack’s head of product, explains that the company hopes to become a tool where people can perform most of their work in just one application.
“They’re getting all their work done in Slack. They’re talking to each other, they’re taking advantage of notifications from dozens of applications that they rely on to get their work done, [and] they’re taking action on those notifications with message buttons. Slack is not a chat tool … it’s a place where people are producing work product, they’re collaborating around it, [and] they’re creating an archive that serves as a kind of brain for a company,” Underwood said to The Verge.
Source: The Verge