Slack is adding a new feature to its mobile app designed to help you sort through all your unread content faster. It’s called “Catch Up,” and the only way I can describe it is Tinder for Enterprise Messaging. When you tap “Catch Up” at the top of the app’s home screen, it will show you the channel or DM one at a time; swipe left to mark it as read, swipe it to the right to leave it unread.
Akshay Bakshi, director of product management at Slack, said the company sees a lot of things going on, and Catch Up is a response to both of them.First, there is only one a lot of What you do in Slack, opening each channel one after the other just to check it out and mark it as read in the sidebar, is a pin. Secondly, many people use their phones as their Slack sorting device. “When they get to their desk in the morning, or when they leave their desk, or maybe at lunch — a 30-second session, really quick, just trying to catch up. And then what they want to get back on the desktop stays. Deal with it later.” The swipe approach, he said, is meant to make the process fun and easy, rather than like checking email or scrolling through another feed.
Slack is always trying to figure out how to become more powerful and feature-rich, becoming the center of everything you and your company do without making the app so bloated and complex that it becomes a chore . Slack has made a number of changes in recent months, including a near-complete redesign of the app in an effort to give you ways to organize and categorize all your content.
Catch Up actually ignores much of what organizations are about. It’s almost a homage to the way Slack used to be: a sidebar filled with content, all either read or unread. When you swipe to “Catch Up,” Slack doesn’t put your right swipe into the “Later” section it wants you to use as a to-do list; it just leaves it unread. (You can long-press a card and save it for later, but that’s intentionally hidden.) It may not be the best way to use Slack in the company’s favor, but Slack’s senior vice president of design, Ethan Eismann, says it’s very good. “The nice thing about Read/Unread is that it’s an escape hatch,” he said. “If I’m not ready to make a decision… unread. It’s easy.”
Bakshi said Catch Up still has a lot of work to do, including using artificial intelligence to help summarize and organize cards to help you make faster swipe decisions. Currently, it determines what you care about most based on your own channel and chat organization, but he said there may be more sophisticated ways to handle the system over time.
Catch Up launches today for non-paying Slack users on iOS and Android, and Slack says it will roll out to paid users soon. It’s also coming to the iPad, but in a slightly different form. Eismann said he doesn’t expect a swipe tool to be coming to the Slack desktop app anytime soon, but he thinks there are plenty of opportunities for more categorization and organization on your computer. “We’ve been experimenting with the idea of giving you more focus modes on the desktop,” he said. “If I were a betting man, I’d say next year we’ll start doing a better job of enabling a more centralized experience in Slack.”
