In July 2013, I got an email from Stewart Butterfield. I recognized his name immediately. I was a big fan of Flickr, which he co-founded and sold to Yahoo, and we were both based in the Pacific Northwest. He had big news: he was shutting down Glitch, the game he’d started in 2009, and was working on something new. He wanted us to design his new team chat app. I groaned to myself. We were avid users of Campfire, and had tested out the many copycat products that had come out over the years. I felt the problem had already been solved. It was a crowded market and knew it would be difficult to make his product stand out from the crowd. Regardless, I was excited to get a chance to work with Stewart, and thought it would be fun to solve some of the issues that we’d had with Campfire. We shook hands, kicked things off, and rolled up our sleeves. When he pulled back the curtain and shared their early prototype on day one, it looked like a hacked together version of IRC in the browser. Barebones and stark. Just six weeks later, we had done some of the best work of our careers. So, how did we get from hacky browser IRC to the Slack we all know and love?

Some of our early design iterations (2013)

Figuring out why something is successful in retrospect is like trying to describe the taste of water. It’s hard. We aren’t big on process. We prefer to just put our heads down and design stuff, iterating over and over again until something feels right. Slack was no different — there wasn’t any magic process we used — but looking back, I’ve identified a few key things that helped make it the huge success it’s become. When you hear people talk about Slack they often say it’s “fun”. Using it doesn’t feel like work. It feels like slacking off, even when you’re using it to get stuff done. But when you look under the hood, it’s almost identical to every other chat app. You can create a room, add people, share files, and chat as a group or direct message one another. So, what makes Slack different? Three key things.

Zeroing in on the branding (2013)

It Looks Different To get attention in a crowded market, we had to find a way to get people’s attention. Most enterprise software looks like a cheap 70's prom suit — muted blues and greys everywhere — so, starting with the logo, we made Slack look like a confetti cannon had gone off. Electric blue, yellows, purples, and greens all over. We gave it the color scheme of a video game, not an enterprise collaboration product. Here’s HipChat next to Slack: