Spec 2019: Block by block: Constructing rich app experiences in Slack

please take this opportunity to silence your cellphone's we will begin momentarily please welcome staff product designer at SLAC Katie Chen hi everyone my name is Katie Chen and I'm the staff product designer here at SLAC I'm so excited to share with you what my team and I have been working on this past year with pocket the UI component library for our platform that makes it easier for developers like yourself to build rich user experiences now first some housekeeping will be having Q&A at the end so feel free to submit your questions on slider comm just enter the event code spec 2019 and select the room plan and we'll get to your questions at the end let's get started by recapping a few highlights from yesterday's keynote we introduce the slack app toolkit the happy path for building engaging apps on slack now first there's granular permissions a new way to handle permissions where you only request the scripts you need to function we announce updates to block it with the addition of many highly requested components such as multi select input and radius next bucket now extends to two brand-new surfaces modal's and a perm these new interactive services surfaces will enable you to build rich and to end experiences enabling apps to go beyond just messages and lastly we announce actions simple shortcuts for your user to trigger and complete an action with your app from many more places in slack now today we're going to focus on how to approach the user facing elements of these app toolkit specifically how you can use bucket in combination with the surfaces that are now available and here's what you can expect in the next 40 minutes I'll be sharing some best practices on how to how to approach designing apps then we'll walk through an end to an example of a workflow deconstructing which blocks and surfaces to use and after that I'll buy a few of your app fellow app developers on stage to talk about that about their bucket learnings and then we'll wrap it all up with some Q&A now this year we've been working really hard to open up more surfaces within slack for Barkat to show up to enable interactions between your app and end-users so let's get to know what each one of these are first up messages up until now this has been the only surface area web block it is available it's used for Direction direct conversation interactions between your app and end users and sometimes in channels we recommend using messages for notifications real-time updates and prompt for users to take immediate action moodle's this is one of the new surfaces launched which we're in love with it's like a more robust interactive ephemeral message Who am I kidding it's so much more now moodle's enable a focus moment an interaction outside of messaging use modal's to show detailed information or guide users through a structure workflow like feeling filling out a form completing a survey or even booking a trip now modal's can show up anywhere in slack whether it's triggered through a slash command or block hit button lastly we have the Home tab within app harm previously known as bot DM as in its name it's the home for your app this surface is a persistent space for users to reliably go to kick off in action or view information now use home when you want end-users to get to an overview like a dashboard or curated updates and I highly encourage you to use the space to inspire action and that's it for a recap of surfaces next I want to share with you how I go about designing apps now before you jump into coding or block head builder here's a checklist to help you hone in on what to build first identify your key value props many of you already have a web app it's important it's not always the case they're like replicate or your functionality into slack into a slack app it's important before you start building that you are clear about your value props and how that connects with what slack provides to make sure that it the experience is efficient for your user number two recep should be purpose-driven at every step ask yourself what I need from the user to help them move forward is it more information do I need them to take an action on something having a clear purpose will enable your workflow to be clear concise and simple lastly every surface is good for a specific use case now we just went through it message for notifications modal's for focus deep work home for a consistent experience where the users can reliably go back to you now if you are clear with your purpose choosing the appropriate blocks and surfaces will be much easier okay I know you've been looking at a lot of text on slides and that's completely unusual for designer let's put everything I've just said into practice let's use an example imagine we're building an expense app I have two key value props one is to make the experience of filling out expenses and getting them approved efficient and easy second I want to give managers the ability to keep up with the team spending status here's the flow from getting an expense approved to seeing an overview and as you can see every step only has one purpose how n uses name is Julie and today she's submitting an expense step 1 what do I need from Julie well I need the receipt of that expense and the information around that particular transaction so what should the experience be instead of slash commands or getting Julie to hop out of slack go to my web ab login click through some screens just to upload a receipt I'm gonna leverage the ability to upload files an image into into slack to trigger an expense report creation process once the image has been received I can show her a message and ask her for more information now its enable Julie to import more info the new model is perfect for this use case instead of her messaging and interacting chatting with my bot she can just type into a phone and here are the blocks I used to create this form modal's match the offering of dialogue and so much more now you can have up to like 100 blocks ranging from layouts to just information images static dynamic selects multi select and multi-step modal's if that's what you need to break up a really robust workflow next approving the expense I asked myself what I need from Julie's manager well first I need to get their attention and then I need them to take action for at least look at this thing or to get it approved a notification via message view is great for that here I'm showing a quick summary about the expense for the manager to see let's break it down this is how this summary is laid out a section block to add mention Julie so you can when you hover over her name you can see a bit of information about uh a context block for dates that's what context well it's look grateful section with image for details now I love this block it's such a simple block to have a branding moment where you can express the type of data or showed Brandon illustrations to help users identify the type of information if that's confidential also you stand out from a normal conversation if it was published in a channel and most importantly an action block to make it clear there are some actions for the users to take in this case it's the manager in this case the manager wants to see more details if the manager wants to see more details they're looking for assurance the experience should be distraction free so the modal is perfect for that pulling together the necessary blocks I can provide a great layout to show all the details that Julie has taken the time to enter and here I've laid out the information in the order of hierarchy context block to highlight who and to show a face to the name I use the same section with image block to maintain a sense of familiarity so her manager can kind of skim this part and focus on other parts of the model for perhaps the information they are looking for an image block for the receipt itself it's probably what the thing they're they're after so clicking on it will show a full image in its full scale most importantly again an action block here to highlight that there are some actions were expecting the manager to take once the expense has been approved what should we do well let's let Julie know so she can feel assured that her expenses have been approved and we've moved along nicely I'm sure she would appreciate that and then ruffling through her emails for that update Julie gets a notification that her expense has been approved from her farm she can see that and here you see the layouts pretty familiar but it's on mobile that's a great thing about blocking you only build once and we help you scale across iOS and Android so you don't have to hire an additional Android and iOS developers so that's it for the workflow of submitting an expense and getting a proof pretty easy right now what about my other Valley prop of enabling managers to keep up to date with the team's expense in this case I want a consistent place for the manager to go to to get a holistic view of the expenses and those pending approval without needing to type or memorize any slash commands so what might that look like here it is tada this is my app's harm it's an overview for the expense activities of a team here you can see how the team is spending and what the team is spending on and by the looks of it they need to take a little less ubers now I can also see the expense that need my attention and I can always click on home to see this no more slash commands yep you better believe it this view is absolutely powered by blocking using the blocks that some of you already familiar with and there I go again using section with image to create a little bit of a branding moment for each expense type it's underutilized and as a designer I feel the responsibility to tell you about it ok so that rounds out on how to build an app using the new surfaces and box now remember these three steps that before you start coding next time one know what your value props are ok it's not about fitting all your functionality into the pack app it's about what part of your functionality and how it matches the users needs to every step should have a purpose ask yourself what do you need from the user to help them move forward and three once you know your purpose choosing the right surface and blocks should be much simpler now I want to introduce to you Natalie from doodle a service to help you find the best time to schedule meetings with clients colleagues and friends she'll share with you how her team has translated the existing doodle experience into a slack app using pocket afta Pete from guru a knowledge manager system for the modern company he will come on stage to discuss how he's leveraged pocket to continuously iterate on an internal custom app use the guru so without further ado let's put our hands together for Nathalie [Applause] hello everybody hi I'm Natalie jacuz bovitz and I'm a product manager at doodles tel-aviv office and together with teams across Europe and the u.s. we build scheduling tools to help busy professionals make meetings happen today I want to share with you the process of how we built the doodle bot how he brought our web-based application into slack and turn it into a full-grown bot okay this is that so for over ten years doodles web based scheduling tool has been used by hundreds of millions of busy professionals around the world so it was only a matter of time until this tool would find its way into slack today's busy professionals own natural habitat and this motivation really materialized for us last year as we were getting continuously user feedback and customer requesting for this feature please bring us those doodle time poles into our work a workspaces at slack and as I'm sure you folks can also attest to when we were thinking about this we were saying integrating your product into another one is a delicate balancing act not only on the technical level of course but also on the user facing interaction level so as well we were also saying to ourselves when we do this we want to make sure we were not just moving and communicating information from one application to another but rather this should be an opportunity to rethink doodle in this new context and turn it into a super tool because the medium is the message right the way we send and receive information can sometimes be more important than from the information itself and the medium through which the mess she's experienced really shapes our perception of it so we wanted to make sure that we were tapping into slack's contextual awareness when we were rethinking doodle alla slack and saying that together with conversations and tools and channels and threads it was really an exciting opportunity just to rethink how would that react newly in slack so with that approach at the heart of our process we started to distill what it really means that doodles scheduling experience really stripping to its core what it is that our users were asking of us and you know we were thinking we're designing we were not really sure until we came up with the concept and we understood what's really important for our users is that we keep a sense of familiarity from what they know and love for years and bring it into slack in the same way because it wouldn't matter if the experience would be enhanced and interactive it wouldn't if it would not keep that sense of something they know and love but that's a challenge and that's when we realize it's not an easy task it's really not an obvious exercise to bring an interactive web UI into slag and keep that common thread it meant that we need to make sure our users recognize this in slack and feel that the simplicity and effectiveness the dual doodle has always been able to provide them remains intact ok so what do I mean with that mental model so users think they know how to interact within the within the product within that system based on that mental model that they have of it so this is how they would predict their interactions and how they would basically use our product and we needed to make sure it stays the same and then I'm gonna show you what it is that mental model the unique doodle experience of scheduling meetings so this is how you do it in doodle an event organizer create an event and then they put in the information of the meeting details right so the title the location the description then they decide on their guest list and then when they get to the next phase they pick out of a counter view a few time options then once all of that is ready and shared with the participants everybody can vote and then they are the organizer can easily see and decide with the visual simple view what options best scheduling that meeting right there and then let's take a deeper look these are the interactions we were trying to get into the slack app we were building this is what we didn't want to miss out on we needed to make sure we stay true to okay this is the first step we're creating this poll and we are guided through a multi-step wizard flow creating our event we enter the title the location and the note second step over here we type in some email addresses deciding on our guests when this is done we get to the next step where we see our calendar we choose some time options that could be potential for this meeting gonna give some options so everybody can vote and see what's convenient and once once this is shared everybody can vote depending on their availability and preferences so what makes this entire flow unique to doodle and very special well two things one when we are creating this event we are guided through by step by step and we can really focus on each and every task in each of its steps deconstructed this flow and then when we get to this view over here it really plays on a social effect as well as on the visual expressiveness on this table of this table where we can see exactly who voted on what what is the trend what's everybody gonna vote on so we see here for example captain Brian the VP of our organization voted only on one option maybe we would make the effort to also vote on that option and receive people start to vote on that making the organizers life very easy and make this meeting happen the organizer of course can then see and if they know captain Bryant is not important for that specific meeting they can choose otherwise so with that in mind how do we take all of that the tabled agreed the visual expressiveness and bring it into slack as you might have guessed block it really helped so here I'm gonna stop and I'm gonna ask you in the audience who has already started to build with the block yet okay nice nice a lot of people that's cool so I hope I can share some of our team's experience about how we did that and how the blockade really introduced us with many great design elements that enabled an interactive view so everything starts in the Builder this is where I plan the layouts of the interactions of the views of each and every flow part of the flow for the user so I played around with it wanted to see what would fit best what is the best visual hierarchy for these blocks to work together maybe bring in the wizard itself into the slack workspace I would click on the Left pane on the blog in and that would jump in in the middle the JSON data would stack automatically on the right pane and then in the middle I see visually the preview of what's gonna go down the most important thing I always do is send it directly into our workspace to get a vivid understanding of the look and feel how it would be with an interaction with users this is where we used to test it with users and this is where I usually changed my mind tons of times but the great thing about this I was easily able to do that because all of this process then we didn't even get to the development side all of this process was planned and iterated on simple quick and cheap so by the time we this was thought through iterated and validated and it got to the engineering teams desk it had a visual to accompany it it had the JSON data all ready and ready to execute quickly can you imagine having to wait to the development team with develop this to production only then to iterate on it only then to test it we iterated tons of times okay let's break it down block by block and see what we came up with so this is how you create a poll today with the doodle bot inside slack so we took into account the medium and the context right so what does it mean to schedule a meeting when you're working you're in your routine your conversational workspace so we decided to break down that wizard into one single view and with the help of the divider and the context box we were able to present a frame for each section instead of a step-by-step flow within those classified sections we use the same blocks the divider and the context to outline the primary and secondary content so the eye really knows where to go to look for the actions informations and guidelines but what's there also just to support so mixing up those blocks bringing out those steps it resulted really in a visually cognitive design elements that enable an interactive view so let's look one by one how we did that so first this is the first step we're creating the pole with the contextually positioned button in the next to the greeting we can say you can edit your details here and with the dialog pop-up obviously it's easy to insert the details and the part is updated with the overflow block we positioned it right there on the right top and here we're tapping into too familiar mental models both of slags mass ejections where we know we have more options but this is also where the user will look for those primary account features on the website so it also makes sense it's referencing the entire session so whenever a user would create or edit a poll it will be they're serving as a as a navigational anchor okay next step inviting our participants so as I said we really wanted to integrate the doodle bot into the ecosystem in slack of each and every team where on the web we can only invite participants via their email addresses right we connect the account we connect the contact book but this is what we can do on the web inside slack of course we can type that in it would create the entity and would be added but we can also now invite entire channels to a poll and we create a personalized contact book for each and every user another favorite usage of ours of the context block always providing the users with reassurance and feedback of what's going on we we decided were there invitees we closed that menu we see the three are selected but before they're going to send out that invitation they're probably gonna refresh the third one they're gonna want to refresh their memory and with the context block it's there to give another layer of information just in case you needed always giving you that feedback and sense of control third part and this is really groundbreaking for us as a scheduling company and all we got to work with the date picker so this was on our wish list since forever but can you imagine just doing this without block it this was a dream come true for us and of course in line blocks that show connection between in the information and the call to action so you see that X button over there looks innocent right but you cannot do that without the block it so how would you remove that option from that view when we were trying to iterate and work with attachments that action was hidden under a menu to really get to dynamic interactions that was not possible before the blockade and then once the poll is done and shared in a channel or in a DM of course we're via email into the outside world we get to see this view again the context blocks are our best friends here we mix them up with images so you can see the profile pictures tapping into again the two mental models both of slack where we see the people we talk to we interact with but also doodles we see the pictures who voted on what where is the trend going and created kind of a progress bar component that helps the organizer and the participants see at a glance what's going on and where'd the voting going to so mental model kept and in the end this is what we did pivoted so from a table view a visual agreed we turned it into a linear one but the one that really keeps the mental model of how users know and love to interact with doodle polls the one thing we were able to introduce in addition inside slack is something that we cannot do on the web is actionable notifications so on the web the way we we communicate with our users to update them on comments and updates to the poll and the progress of the voting is via emails this is how we can communicate with them inside slack we have a dynamically real life updating message that takes on that information but keeps it disturbance free so this is what we did and I want to share with you the key learnings for me and my team from building 100% unblock it first one is as I said we were already half through building this product when we were introduced to block it and it was a turning point for us because we realized our applications communicate with content so it's key and crucial that this content is delivered with visual hierarchy in mind to keep it easy to consume and understand just see what we could come up with here with the attachments the actions all hide behind those menus we would use typing in on those menu bars in order to create another entity to add or remove an option it's not really clear the eyes kind of confused not knowing where to go really overwhelming with information now when we look at the block yet version everything is well aligned everything makes sense the connection is kept with with the information and the call to action you know what you can do and the context Doc's are there to guide you and add additional metadata another layer of information and feedback next our goal for this product was to get to 1,000 teams working with doodle on slack in a month and when we were building with the block it working about this mental model we really didn't know how it would be perceived by hundreds of millions of users who know doodle so I can just share with you block it has been really a dream come true for us in the way we were able to interact with the users and we got that feedback back in two weeks from our launch we hit our goal and within one month we get to 30,000 to 30,000 teams thirty thousand teams around the world using doodle on slack so you can only imagine today more than six months after this launch the doodle bot is a very important part of the doodle ecosystem ultimately and this is really something we take from this whole journey this really changed the way we work internally now iterating and optimizing for usability and quality is kept at a very low cost it's simple and easy without even getting to the engineers so the resource that is the most precious for us the engineers time is focused and can really execute what we know we validated with users so the message I really want to share with you today is we are the users of Lockette it's up to us now to go play with it go build with it and come up with new norms new ways of mixing and matching those blocks together contacts with images dividers and contacts and then that inline action we are here to re-evaluate and study those blocks that keep coming out fresh and come up with creative new ways to interact with our users so let's build thank you and now I'm excited to call to the stage feed from guru who will share with us how he worked with blogaid in their internal apps [Applause] hi my name is Pete Michael I'm an architect of guru gurus and knowledge management solution we created guru because we believe that knowledge you need to do your job should find you our product delivers the on-the-job knowledge you need when and where you need it from sales pitches to support calls and everywhere in between to do this viewer needs to be everywhere you work not another destination you have to navigate to taking you out of your workflow we have a web application browser extensions mobile applications integrations with applications like Salesforce Zendesk Gmail and intercom even a BS code plugin and of course a slack application we dedicated a lot of time to making a first-class user experience for our users in slack as slack has added functionality like block it and actions we've been able to make a richer user experience for our users we take the same approach when developing internal tools or guru I want to tell you about how we built an internal application on slack and how we were able to bring that same rich user experience to our internal employees first let's talk about the problem we need to solve guru is founded about six years ago and by late 2015 we had about 10 employees like many startups were trying to go fast with limited resources our internal sales and CS teams need to access information about our customers and the ability to administer their accounts at that time I was the only backhand developer on the team and I developed a couple internal admin API is to help solve this problem but our sales and CS teams weren't comfortable using them the natural reaction of an engineering team this situation would be to build an internal web application to solve the problem but we didn't when I divert our entire team to this and take it away from building news features for guru we were heavy slack users and the idea of applying and not another destination concept his internal problem was very compelling we would build our internal admin application on slack because our team was already spending most of their day there there are other compelling reasons to build on slack keeping our users in the workflow being the most important additionally when you build on slack you get some things for free for instance you can leverage their built-in user authentication known to build that whole system out yourself another added benefit is having that that works in the browser on a desktop and even on mobile without any extra effort on your part finally you can rely on a steady stream of improvements from slack since we've been building on slack they've released dialogues actions block hit and the recent modal's and have home mounts ones for these reasons and more we decided to build on slack and it was time for the most important decision of any product what's name it without thinking through the ramifications I named this application Pete bought with a narcissistic name and a creepy avatar I was off to a good start people began very simply with just a few actions but over time as we added more features to guru we need to add more features to Peapod and more and more teams at guru from sales of cs and engineering to finance needed to rely on guru with his growth using p bob became more complicated but we've been able to use new slack features to simplify the user experience i'd like to walk you through some examples of how people ID has changed over the years showing you initial versions of pbot contrasted with refactorings that took advantage of these new slack features the initial version of peat bog was a conversational but the user would enter a short two or three word phrase and i would trigger Peapod to prompt the user for more information and then perform an action here's what our help menu look like before our first bigger factoring what started as a few functions quickly swelled to unmanageable number imagine being a new user and coming to this screen and trying to figure out where to start it just wasn't happening to counteract this we utilize block it to consolidate our commands and move access the contextual irrelevant locations in our display for instance rather than have eight commands that that was administering different aspects of a guru team we had a single slash command to load information about the team and then use block head actions and overflow menus help guide the user to the actions they can perform in this team view we have some basic information about the team and guru there are several different actions they can take and we took the most common ones and put them as buttons across the bottom when a user clicks on these buttons we replace the view but always offer them a back to team navigation option here the users viewing the collections on a team going back to the team and viewing the permissions on a team in the old Peapod this would required stringing together several commands and continually pasting in the in the team ID at guru we have a three free 30-day trial and we casually had the need to extend that trial a guru employee can come here see the trial expiration date and use the overflow menu to see put that action right next to the expiration date to extend the trial being able to put these actions near the information the display has greatly reduced the number of questions that come up and the amount of training needed to use Peapod the block if grabbed home announcement from yesterday takes the cease abuse to a new level we build a homepage for Pete bot that shows common actions perform across the top the user no longer needs to remember the slash command syntax and it can just simply click a button next we display recent your teams and users have been viewed it's very common for a user to have to go back into a team they recently worked with so just saves a lot of time for our employees we've just scratched the surface with this new feature I'm excited to take it to the next level and apply to our guru slack application as well going back to the trial extension workflow that we touched on earlier in the old Pete bot you'd initiate the command extend a trial the bot would prompt you for a team ID and a new expiration date if you messed up the team ID or put the expiration date in the wrong format you had to start all over again with block it and the new modal functionality this workflow has become much simpler you can click on the action in the overflow menu next to the expiration date and you're presented with a simple modal it gives you context about the action you're performing we utilize block it to put information on the top about the current trial expiration date when the trial started and how long it's been active and we use a date picker input to choose the new expiration date the user no longer has to worry about the format of the date and they can use a date picker input that's very familiar this greatly cuts down in errors like a certain sales manager groov that was actually only using 2018 as a year well into 2019 finally the workflow has been the messiest has been the one where we enable features on a team there are times when we have a new feature that we want to give to a team as early access or left in trial for a brief period when we started this workflow there were only a few feature flags but over the years list of feature flags has grown extensive here the users triggering the enable feature workflow Peapod shows a list of all the features that are available which we've blurred out here to protect our secret features but you can see how massive the list is it's extremely unusable in this form when we applied block it to this workflow we're able do a number of things make it easier to work with first just having the different layout options and divider to block it help to organize this list of features then we're able to select menu to help choose the feature that'd be enabled and an inline button for removing features all these block 8 can together help make this more of a familiar experience for the user and it no longer feel that you're interacting with a bot but more as a native web experience when I rolled the new-and-improved Pete bought out to the team the response was overwhelmingly positive with an internal tool like this you're looking for ways of helping your team do their job faster and with less friction he Potts been able to do that from the start but integrating new features like block it has taken this to a new level and made a huge difference in ease of use and how to scale its new features rabbit I highly recommend that you develop internal tools on slack as I stated before your team already spends a lot of time in slack and anything you do to keep them from having to switch back and forth between applications will help save them a lot of time some of the things that I've learned while working on people for the last three years is first to start small and iterate you don't need to have a grand vision start with a single function and get feedback if you can make one function work more smoothly an organization you're already successful gold off and from there next take advantage of the new tools of slack releases you want to foolery factory application to do this for instance you can apply block it to a single screen or workflow at a time one thing that's very nice about how slack releases these features is that they're all additive and work well together finally don't name your app Pete bot unless your name isn't key it was cute and we were a 10-person company but now there are new hires they meet Pete Bob before they meet me and it's extremely awkward also as a common occurrence for users to mistakenly DM me instead of Pete bot I always do my best to respond as a bot would in situation thank you [Applause] now thanks Pete Natalie I'm sure you have questions that popped up as you heard these amazing stories building with pocket so let's get to the Q&A now feel free to go to slide oh it's still happening to some you submit your questions so let's take a look and what's being submitted so far okay the first one is which is highest voted the blocks right now are pretty rigid section with image always has image on the right any plans for making it more flexible absolutely I think a lot of you have asked for this and like right now we're laying down the foundations we're also trying to figure out like how can we give the type of flexibility that you are looking for at the same time to ensure that the experience isn't jarring especially within like the message experience so we're gonna figure it out that's get a question from it's moving around for doodle for adding participants section how will it work wait how will it work if organization is big and slack allows only a hundred elements searching is hard due to three-second rule right so we use a dynamic menu with key by key filtering so you can type in the person you are looking to invite or that channel or that email address and you'll find it quickly and easily even if it's not on the top of the list okay a question [Music] oh yeah this one is it possible to link people to the home tab from the message tab with a link or button so right now you can kind of do it with a message ID like deep link but we're trying to figure out a way to do that handle that more smoothly so stay in tuned like tell us especially after the session let the team that's working on block it right in the back know about this so we intend halogen this question is doodle what block it component did you use to add those thumbnails of users that have voted so we used context block together with the images and it's really our proudest moment yeah face filing we love it question here can you give us a few example for slack apps using the new app home really well so I would say guru is one of them we released this actually quite recently and they've jumped on board quickly to build it we're anticipating more people there like play with it and see what they can build so stay in tuned we're hoping to like share that learning and like what we see as it comes in let's see can you have custom home view specific to different users you can help us answer that one yeah absolutely so each anytime an user navigates to the home view you get an event basically saying that the app home was opened and you can also push to that at any point in time so you can push to that in the background without even being prompted so that when they navigate there it's already there or you know if someone goes there for the first time you can give them a boarding message or something like that yeah one add to that that's part of why also we created app home so that like the view is unique to the user to pending on like where they are so for example like an onboarding flow where they need to do additional authorizations or potentially submit more information it is unique to that user any plans on adding a time picker block yes I think it's on the wall in the back and definitely it's it's you know short midterm or oh man I'm looking at page the PM unblock it here oh this one's for doodle how do you track which actions people are doing by slack so we triggered oh so we lost a bit of audio for Natalie hold on a second bear with us oh thank you thanks I think this question everybody wants to hear it so thank you yeah so we send events we trigger events and we send it into an analytics tool so we use amplitude and this is where we track the interactions this question I think it's regarding the example I showed where in this flat where in slack is the manager notified direct message from expense app message in app home yep so it's in the message section of the app itself so the knee app home has three sections the home tab which is new message app message tab will still be there just like today and the About tab so nothing has changed there and you can send your notifications like that just a message view just like you do today [Music] how ABB's layout different types information in a perm for expenses how to separate my own expenses fire so this is specific to the expense app but I also want to pass these questions to developers about how would you how would you do that layout just making layout decisions I think I think one of the important things is this kind of like a blank canvas for you so you can apply it whatever you want to it which is great it's also maybe overwhelming but for us we like to put common actions across the top and then maybe something beneath that that is you know relevant information that you know people people want to have their fingertips and just be able to go in there and quick access to it do you have anything we haven't used the Home tab yet but definitely for us the target would be to keep the automated dynamic content there that's gonna provide the feedback for things that you want we always want to look back to and have kind of a similar view so yeah yeah and for me I use a section block and I bold it to make sure it stands out and with a divider at the bottom so I can clearly section out and use that kind of as a heading so you can clearly separate different sections that way I've just been to where over time so sorry okay so thank you Natalie and Pete for sharing your story today and thank you so much for everyone for the questions please check out the block it documentation and get a deep dive of everything you need and please stop playing around with a bucket builder where you can make some match the box now I really encourage you to go to the build workshop this afternoon or talk to the people that may block it amazing which will be in the back here in a builder section especially you have voting or request of blocks we'd love to hear from you so please come hang out with us after the session behind so thank you and a happy building [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Slack

Views: 3,224

Keywords: Spec, Conference, Developer, API, Integration, Apps

Id: qzmrTDvCs28

Length: 49min 11sec (2951 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 06 2019