{"id":9302,"date":"2023-08-12T21:20:29","date_gmt":"2023-08-12T21:20:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/leadership\/slacks-new-redesign-illustrates-its-non-negotiable-commitment-to-building-accessible-tools-for-work\/"},"modified":"2023-08-12T21:20:30","modified_gmt":"2023-08-12T21:20:30","slug":"slacks-new-redesign-illustrates-its-non-negotiable-commitment-to-building-accessible-tools-for-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mysourcefunding.com\/?p=9302","title":{"rendered":"Slack\u2019s New Redesign Illustrates Its \u2018Non-Negotiable\u2019 Commitment To Building Accessible Tools For Work"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Popular workplace communication tool Slack this week announced a major revamp of its software. In a blog post, the Salesforce-owned company described the reimagined user interface as being \u201cbuilt for focus\u201d by using what it calls \u201cbetter organization and [a] more intuitive layout.\u201d The new interface, which began rolling out on Thursday, will continue to propagate over the coming months, according to Slack.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know millions of people start and end their workday in Slack, so we took great care to ensure these improvements make it a more productive and pleasant home,\u201d Noah Weiss, chief product officer at Slack, said in a statement. \u201cThe new experience helps teams stay better organized, focus on what\u2019s important, and quickly access a growing set of tools in Slack.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Slack\u2019s post, the redesign has three high-level goals: make navigating channels and the like easier; helps users focus on the most important information; and help users find their most essential tools.<\/p>\n

Of course, one of the crucial components of Slack\u2019s new interface is accessibility. Almost exactly a year ago, I spoke with Slack\u2019s senior engineering manager Sommer Panage about the company\u2019s then-new software update aimed at making the app more accessible to disabled people. Panage, whose pedigree includes stints at Twitter and Apple working on accessibility, told me accessibility is key as the app \u201cbecomes this digital headquarters even more, [especially] now that more people are working remotely, we want to be really sure that it is more accessible across all platforms and more equitable across all platforms.\u201d<\/p>\n

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As for this week\u2019s announcement, both Panage and product manager Chris Xu told me in recent interviews that a big part of the redesign\u2019s accessibility is a conscious reduction of cognitive load. The bigger picture story, however, lies in the fact accessibility was prioritized from the very beginning once company leadership decided on undertaking the project.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe dedicated accessibility teams at the company sprung into action once we realized this [the redesign] was something we had to get absolutely, critically right from an accessibility point of view,\u201d Xu said.<\/p>\n

Xu continued to tell me it was \u201creally critical to us that we make sure that we were nailing accessibility out of the gate,\u201d adding the teams zeroed in pretty early on in the development process that a core group to which particular attention should be paid is those who are neurodivergent. The allusion to cognitive load is a direct reflection of said attention, insofar as the general busyness of the Slack user interface has always held to potential to overwhelm anyone, but especially those with certain cognitive processing conditions. All told, Xu said the redesign was a \u201cmassive\u201d interdisciplinary project internally, touching teams that had previously never worked with the accessibility group.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe took accessibility considerations very seriously throughout the [development] process and tried to bake it into the fundamental way we were working from a design perspective, ensuring that the product was as accessible as we could possibly make,\u201d said Ethan Eismann, Slack\u2019s senior vice president of design. \u201cIt was a non-negotiable point.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether Slack\u2019s efforts here are successful with customers from a usability standpoint will be determined in the months ahead. For now, the biggest lesson to learn from what Slack has pushed out the door goes beyond the project itself. It\u2019s about the mindset and the culture around accessibility. It\u2019s making accessibility part and parcel of design.<\/p>\n

When I sat down with Panage last year, she explained to me Slack\u2019s institutional eagerness to make Slack a better product by making it more accessible to disabled people. Upon her arrival, one of her goals was to help \u201cbring together an accessibility team kind of under one engineering roof\u201d as a means of bringing more cohesiveness to the company in this regard. The truth is, accessibility has long been a high priority at Slack; it was one of the main motivators for Panage to climb aboard the ship.<\/p>\n

The redesign shows Slack\u2019s commitment to the disability community.<\/p>\n

\u201c[The redesign] is a reflection of how much more mature Slack has gotten in its accessibility process. That this is something that leaders like Ethan are talking about regularly and are asking teams about in high-level reviews, that individual contributors of all different disciplines are getting engaged,\u201d Xu said of Slack\u2019s ethos around accessibility. \u201cEveryone from designers and product folks and engineers all the way to the help team is going to work on documentation and making sure that everything we roll out has this [accessibility] considered in a holistic way. That\u2019s really, to me, what\u2019s exciting is that it reflects that not only we don\u2019t just work on accessibility for \u2018accessibility features.\u2019 This is something that\u2019s becoming part of our standard practice for even the most fundamental and large-scale projects, which this certainly is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Panage concurred. \u201cI think, for me coming to Slack, one of the things I wanted to see was to build a deeper culture of accessibility\u2014something where it\u2019s not a checkbox. It\u2019s not a thing that some<\/em> people think about. It\u2019s a thing that is part of everyone\u2019s day-to-day [work]. It\u2019s part of everyone\u2019s language. it\u2019s part of how we think about building a product,\u201d she said of her goals for impacting Slack\u2019s accessibility efforts. \u201cI think I\u2019m really starting to see that now, particularly with this project being so large-scale; more and more people from all over the company are thinking about this every day [and] talking about every day [and] reaching out to the accessibility team and asking us questions. That is a reflection of Slack starting to really integrate accessibility into the entire culture of the company, not it just being a little piece of the work.\u201d<\/p>\n

For his part, Eismann pointed to industry leaders such as Apple building best-of-breed accessibility software into its panoply of operating systems. Slack, he said, is the operating system for many companies at work in terms of communication and productivity. Slack is a cross-platform app, running on mobile and desktop in many incarnations, and Eismann said a big goal of the company is to \u201cmake sure that the operating system for your work is as accessible as it possibly can be.\u201d<\/p>\n

He continued: \u201cWe\u2019re baking it [accessibility] into our process and the way that we fundamentally work. \u201cI\u2019ve been really pleased to see the evolution of the full spectrum set of design considerations that we account for when we\u2019re working on projects from the beginning. When you make accessibility considerations and commitment to accessibility into your design process from the beginning, the outcome is better for everybody; we\u2019ve seen this time and time again. You get a better product, a more usable product, [and] a more inclusive product. I\u2019ve been pleased by our progress here, but this is an evergreen commitment. We can only do better as we move forward. It\u2019s safe to say we have a fundamental goal that we want to be one of the best in industry when it comes to making our product as inclusive and accessible as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read the full article here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Popular workplace communication tool Slack this week announced a major revamp of its software. In a blog post, the Salesforce-owned company described the reimagined user interface as being \u201cbuilt for focus\u201d by using what it calls \u201cbetter organization and [a] more intuitive layout.\u201d The new interface, which began rolling out on Thursday, will continue to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9303,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9302","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-leadership"},"yoast_head":"\nSlack\u2019s New Redesign Illustrates Its \u2018Non-Negotiable\u2019 Commitment To Building Accessible Tools For Work | Brandiary<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Popular workplace communication tool Slack this week announced a major revamp of its software. 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