Joiner launchpad

Slack is on a mission to make workplace collaboration and communication more pleasant, productive, and simple. When new teammates joined larger teams, it was difficult to discover where conversations were happening and how to get started. As part of onboarding, we also asked users to identify people they knew, which added confusion and friction before landing in Slack. In the spirit of being a good host, we aimed to create a warmer landing experience for joiners to larger, more active teams so that they knew where to engage in conversations and to increase their likelihood of returning to Slack.

Our team launched a series of experiments to gather learnings as we iterated on the experience. We also collaborated with Machine Learning engineers to test a new recommendation model to suggest people to direct message and channels to join. Our experiments ran at the same time as a major redesign of the core product’s information architecture, and we remained in lockstep with the Foundations team to ensure continuity in the user experience.

As the design lead, I worked with Product and Engineering to determine the experiment strategy, iterated on the designs based on usability testing and past experiment results, and after positively increasing the number of returned users, we launched the new experience to production in early 2024.