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Slack is adding a new feature to its mobile app, meant to help you triage all your unread stuff a little faster. It\u2019s called Catch Up, and the only way I can describe it is Tinder for Enterprise Messaging. When you tap on Catch Up at the top of the app\u2019s homescreen, it\u2019ll show you one channel or DM at a time; swipe left to mark it read, right to leave it unread.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Catch Up is a response to two things Akshay Bakshi, a product management director at Slack, says the company sees a lot. First, there\u2019s just a lot <\/em>going on in Slack, and opening every channel one by one just to check in on it and mark it read in the sidebar is a pin. Second, a lot of people use their phone as a Slack-triage device. \u201cBefore they get to their desk in the morning, or when they\u2019re away from their desk, or maybe at lunch \u2014 a 30-second session, super fast, just trying to catch up. Then the stuff they want to get back to at their desktop, they leave it for later.\u201d The swipe-y approach, he says, is an effort to make the process feel fun and easy, not like checking your email or scrolling through yet another feed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Slack is forever trying to figure out how to be more powerful, more feature-rich, and the center of everything you and your company does, without making the app so bloated and complicated it becomes a chore to do. In recent months, Slack has made a number of changes \u2014\u00a0including a near-complete redesign of the app<\/a> \u2014\u00a0in an effort to give you ways to organize and triage all your stuff. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Catch Up actually ignores most of that organization. It\u2019s almost a nod back to the way Slack used to be: a sidebar full of stuff, all of it either read or unread. When you swipe through Catch Up, Slack doesn\u2019t put your right-swipes in the Later section it wants you to use as a to-do list; it just leaves things unread. (You can long-press a card and save it for later, but that\u2019s deliberately hidden.) It\u2019s not the company-blessed Best Way to Use Slack, maybe, but Slack\u2019s design SVP Ethan Eismann says that\u2019s fine. \u201cThe nice thing about read \/ unread is it\u2019s kind of an escape hatch,\u201d he says. \u201cIf I\u2019m not ready to make a decision… unread. It\u2019s easy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Bakshi says there\u2019s lots left to do with Catch Up, including using AI to help summarize and organize the cards to help you make swiping decisions even faster. Right now, it looks to your own organization of channels and chats to figure out what you care about most, but he says there might be more sophisticated ways to approach the system over time. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Catch Up is launching today for non-paying Slack users on iOS and Android, and Slack says it\u2019ll roll out to paid users soon. It\u2019s coming to the iPad, too, but in a slightly different form. Eismann says he doesn\u2019t imagine a card-swiping tool coming to the Slack desktop app anytime soon, but he thinks there\u2019s plenty of opportunity for more triage and organization on your computer. \u201cThat idea of giving you more of a focused mode on desktop is one we\u2019ve played with,\u201d he says. \u201cIf I were a betting man, I would say we\u2019ll start to better achieve a more focused experience in Slack over the next year.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n