We are all created to work. Whether it’s crafting a warm cup of perfectly-roasted coffee, to engineering new databases for software, to caring for a little one’s life as a parent, everyone has a part to play in making this world turn. And we certainly cannot make this world turn on our own — we need a community of working individuals to labor together in order to function and enjoy life as a society. In order to achieve this, we are in a dire need. A need for great communication and connection with one another!
With the emergence of the digital age, thankfully this goal has become easier than ever to succeed in this goal. Social media and the internet gives us access to almost everything at our fingertips. Messaging apps have become the basis of telecommunication for work. Apps such as Slack, Discord, and Microsoft Teams are used daily by working professionals to spark robust and profitable conversation.
To explore how remotely working designers currently approach completing their daily tasks in work, I decided to investigate and compare the features of different design software and communication applications that exist in the current market. This gave me a good grasp of the current competitive space that we were dealing with.
Research
Communication in the design field is vital for success in the collaborative and creative processes.
Throughout the design process to create a more enjoyable experience for remotely-working designers in their daily workflows, I learned two main things.
Don’t be overly attached to one design.
With more research, user testings, and feedback received, more changes needed to be made in order to meet our user’s needs. I found that we couldn’t be too attached to one design, but be constantly on the lookout to iterate and create a better design.
Base your design approaches on real, user feedback.
Without a solid foundation of real, user data, we could never be sure if our design was truly meeting our target users’ needs. By approaching our designs with the feedback given through research, interviews, and testing on real stakeholders, we gained confidence in our designs.
Reflection
Table of Contents
Background
Skills
My Role
UX Researcher
Visual and UI Designer
Team
Imogen Yang
Judy Kim
Sehee Kim
User research
UI/UX Design
User Testing
Timeline
10 weeks
Jan 2025 - Mar 2025
kate hong
design
powered by doodles and daydreams <3
Designing a Pop-Up Extension for Slack Messaging to sustain work flow for remote-working designers
Problem
Specifically, easy communication between designers who work remotely is necessary. Especially as professionals whose work is best when interruptions in their creative flows are kept to a minimum, designers need an application that would allow them to communicate in a way that would not hinder their creative work flow.
Even though we are at the peak of innovation, individuals are faced with limits in what they can achieve in their work due to these communication application tools. Some of these restrictions include having to go back and forth between different applications to complete a task, surfing through a surplus of channels, and missing messages due to a disorganized interface. These problems cause workers to feel frustrated when trying to complete a task which interferes with their productivity.
But, there are limits.
Remote designers experience frustration when they must constantly switch between multiple tools and perform repetitive, manual tasks to receive and respond to design feedback.
This disrupts their creative flow and leads to increased working hours and stress.
The Competitive Spaces
of Design Collaboration
Figma
InVision
Miro
Company
Eliminates
need for
multiple tools
Real-time
collaboration
Reduces
repetitive tasks
Best for
ideation
Notes
Doesn’t require designers to switch between different apps
Allows multiple people to make changes at once
Has issues with ideation, making layering very difficult, slow, and cluttered.
Very good with getting on-hands design feedback, allowing designers to tweak their designs
Doesn’t allow real-time editing
Great for ideation
Allows designers to collaborate on projects simultaneously
Not built for UI prototyping, making it difficult to track previous versions/ keep record of creations.
Through our competitive analysis of different design application tools, Figma appears to have a large variety of assets in comparison to other applications. However, an important shortcoming of Figma is that it doesn’t fully tackle our stakeholders’ issues regarding the usage of communication when needed to share new designs.
Even though InVision seemed to be the worst, I chose this app specifically because its main functionality is giving honed-in feedback for designers to improve their creations. So even though you would need to use another possible app to change your design itself, it permits designers to get the most out of the comments made by coworkers.
Miro is great for initial planning, allowing collaborators to come all together to brainstorm. This competitive analysis will showcase the different improvements that could be made to help solve our problem statement, involving the frustrations of using multiple tools, and the repetitive tasks.
of Corporate Communication
Microsoft Teams
Pumble
Chanty
Company
Eliminates
need for
multiple tools
Real-time
collaboration
Reduces
repetitive tasks
Best for
ideation
Notes
Great for getting messages out on a larger scale (such as announcements)
Has too complex features for smaller teams and individuals
Great for smaller teams to communicate
There is no call function, making it not ideal for all users
Helps with task management within the app, allowing teams to follow each other in progress
Not super secure
Not much room for customizations
On top of the design applications, I also analyzed various communication applications because this is vital for team success. Microsoft Teams and Chanty appear to meet many of the vital communication features that benefit remote-working professionals. However, they do fall short of providing a seamless communication flow in several ways: Microsoft Teams is great for larger teams, but can be quite complex and difficult to navigate on a smaller scale. Chanty is good for in-app task management, however, lacks customization.
Pumble is a great application for smaller teams to communicate, but it does not translate well in a larger scale, as well as not reducing repetitive tasks. It lacks many critical communication functions, such as calling. This makes Pumble not the most ideal application for remote workers.
All three applications lack in the aspect of helping “ideate” new ideas. Taking this into account, we seeked to implement features that would have communication assist in the design ideation process. But before we get there, we need to understand our users on a deeper level.
User Personas
Alright. We have a more comprehensible outlook of the competitors and various apps that exist in terms of design and communication. However, the most important thing still must be defined — who is the user of these applications?
I carefully crafted two user personas to understand who the target audience of users would be to narrow down the research.
Christina
UI/UX Designer at Amazon
Christina is a UI/UX designer at Amazon who mostly works at home - she goes to office once or twice a week. Her workday consists of countless of meetings and keeping up with multiple projects.
Needs:
to look at previous feedbacks or answer questions of her designs
work on continuing projects with updated feedbacks
give progress presentations in team meetings
Pain Points:
difficulty organizing all her project information
difficulty finding her feedbacks from multiple teams + projects
especially after a long weekend
hard to make the presentation fun with interactive feedbacks
creative efficient flexible
Matthew
UI/UX Designer at Start-up
Matthew is a 32 year old UI/UX designer at a start up and works fully at home. His workday consists mostly of designing his company’s new developing app screen.
Needs:
to check in with manager for daily to-do’s
look at feedbacks given and update any screens
send his designs by the end of day to receive more feedbacks
Pain Points:
need to remember where the feedbacks are
priorities get mixed up
awkward transitioning between work tabs
detailed organized patient
To better understand how remote-working designers interact with different applications in their daily work, I conducted 2 interviews with actual designers working in both corporate and start-up settings.
Okay, but what do actual designers say?
Identifying pain points
Finding
Work-flows
Observing
Work-Arounds
Asked about specific technological applications they utilize to complete certain tasks in their everyday work flows.
Both stakeholders mentioned a primary part of completing tasks included utilizing collaborative applications such as Slack or Discord to communicate with their teams.
Slack
Discord
Nice. So, where do designers struggle?
2 Switching between several apps to access feedback while designing.
Our stakeholders also mentioned the inefficiency and awkwardness of a dual-screen which also limits screen space and a full overview of tools.
1 Organizing information or text channels in order to access information.
Our stakeholders didn’t like how they needed to surf through a high density of vague channels in order to find the one with the information needed.
Essentially, remote designers dislike needing to perform various repetitive, manual tasks in order to access the information needed to complete a project.
With a pop-up messaging tab, the designer has full access to team feedback and whatever software they are working on, maintaining their creative momentum.
Pinning channels helps users navigate through a multitude of messages and quickly access the information needed to complete projects.
Solution Preview
Pop-up Messaging Tab
Luigi
Message Luigi
hey did you get to finish yesterday’s work?
Luigi
yeah I did, I sent it to you via email.
You
Wednesday, February 12th
Project Bowser
Design Prototype
Layers
Layer 1
Layer2
Layer3
stickynote
comments
critiques
Pages +
File Assets
Figma
feedback
comments
critiques
Layer 1
Layer 3
Layer 2
Project Bowser
Design Prototype
Layers
Layer 1
Layer2
Layer3
stickynote
comments
critiques
Pages +
File Assets
Figma
feedback
comments
critiques
Layer 1
Layer 3
Layer 2
You have a message
Project Bowser
Design Prototype
Layers
Layer 1
Layer2
Layer3
stickynote
comments
critiques
Pages +
File Assets
Figma
feedback
comments
critiques
Layer 1
Layer 3
Layer 2
Message Luigi
Luigi
Luigi
hey did you get to finish yesterday’s work?
Tuesday, February 11th
Wednesday, February 12th
Project Bowser
Design Prototype
Layers
Layer 1
Layer2
Layer3
stickynote
comments
critiques
Pages +
File Assets
Figma
feedback
comments
critiques
Layer 3
Layer 1
Layer 2
Luigi
Mario
#project Bowser
You
Project Bowser
Design Prototype
Layers
Layer 1
Layer2
Layer3
stickynote
comments
critiques
Pages +
File Assets
Figma
feedback
comments
critiques
Layer 1
Layer 3
Layer 2
yeah I did, I sent it to you via email.
Luigi
Luigi
hey did you get to finish yesterday’s work?
Tuesday, February 11th
Wednesday, February 12th
Project Bowser
Design Prototype
Layers
Layer 1
Layer2
Layer3
stickynote
comments
critiques
Pages +
File Assets
Figma
feedback
comments
critiques
Layer 1
Layer 3
Layer 2
yeah I did, I sent it to you via email.
Luigi
Luigi
Me
hey did you get to finish yesterday’s work?
Tuesday, February 11th
Wednesday, February 12th
Message Luigi
Luigi
Mario Party
Channels
# project Koopa
# project Coins
# project Stars
# project Haunted Mansion
# project Save Peach
# random
# specs
+ marketing
+ research
+ Add channels
Direct messages
Mario
Princess Peach
Luigi
Princess Daisy
Waluigi
Toad
Bowser
Threads
Huddles
Drafts & sent
Wednesday, February 12th
Luigi
hey did you get to finish yesterday’s work?
Tuesday, February 11th
You
Luigi
yeah I did, I sent it to you via email.
Me
Message Luigi
Taking this information from the stakeholder interviews, our team drafted out user flows that displayed the newly implemented features of the application.
After making iterations and improvements, above is the final high-fidelity prototype design of the Slack pop-up messaging tab, as well as the pinned messages feature implemented.
Prototyping + User Testing
Final Deliverables
Slack Pop-up Channel User Flow
Slack Pop-up Window User Flow
Building off of these user flows, we created simple wireframes and tested on our users.
These wireframes show the process of the pop-up messaging tab feature on Slack. When showing this prototype and performing user-testing on our stakeholders, we found several things to iterate.
Pinned Channels
Mario Party
#project Stars
# project Koopa
# project Coins
# project Save Peach
# random
