Challenge #6: Slack AI
Designing a new AI-first experience for Slack
👋 Welcome to the Product Design Challenge: Every month, you’ll receive a realistic product design challenge to work on your skills, including product thinking, UX design, research, and prototyping. You can use it purely for practice purposes or even as a portfolio case study. If you don’t want to receive the monthly challenge, you can manage your preferences in your account settings.
Scenario
You are working in one of Slack's AI Product Squads. Your squad consists of a product manager, three AI-focused engineers, a data analyst, and a user researcher.
Your team has recently launched the first pilot of Slack AI and has seen some positive results with pilot customers. Slack AI can:
Summarise unread messages
Summarise conversations
Answer search queries
From your conversations with existing pilot customers, you notice that customers talk positively about the different AI features but do not remember to use them frequently enough to continue paying for it.
Data
Along with your user researcher and data analyst, you have run a few initial surveys and interview cycles, showing the following:
Customers report a 32% Sean Ellis Test score (“How would you feel if you could no longer use Slack AI?”), which indicates there isn’t product-market fit for the feature just yet. Your team goal is to get that score to 40% and up.
Customers use Slack AI features 1-2 per week, whereas your company goal is to get people to use AI features 3-4 times a day.
Customers report that the AI features are slightly hard to find, so they forget to use them.
Goal
Come up with a new, radical way for Slack users to find and engage with its AI features, that is significantly easier to find than the current version. Assume that the technical possibilities are endless, and your world-class team can work around any concept you can imagine.
Deliverable
Define the goal and key metrics for an initiative like that. What data will show you if you are successful?
Come up with a few ideas using sketching techniques such as Crazy 8’s or Concept Sketching.
Pick your favorite idea, mock it up in Figma, and create a simple, medium-fidelity prototype. You can use one of the Slack UI Kits that are available in the Figma Community to take some inspiration on the overall direction.
Sharing your work
This is an internal exercise, but sharing your work is recommended. If you’d like to openly get feedback from the Designary community, you can share your process and output in the Designary chat.
Recommended tools
Pen & Paper for sketching and ideation.
Figjam or Miro for noting down your thinking & problem definition.
Figma for mockups and prototypes.
This challenge will help you with
Product thinking
AI-first Design
UI Design
UX Design
Prototyping
Disclaimer
This challenge's scenario, data, and content are purely conceptual and for educational purposes.