Liquid Glass showcase: Slack

Hi everyone. Good morning.

I am Jaime DeLanghe and I lead product for the Slack experience at Salesforce.

So I couldn't be more excited to talk to you guys about the big redesign we did with Liquid Glass. As all of you know, big redesigns are every product leader's dream, right? It's so easy. Everyone agrees on the design.

Everything goes seamlessly. There's never any engineering snags. We didn't have anything else we were going to do, right? Right. Well, actually at Slack, it kind of was a no brainer in this case. And I'm going to tell you why. I'm going to talk through our product philosophy to start. And then Akshay on my team is going to come up and he's going to talk about the announcement and how the team felt about it. He's also going to walk you guys through Slack's opportunity, and eventually we'll get to some revelations we had along the way.

So I wasn't joking when I said that. This really was a bit of a no brainer for us.

And that's because Slack's mission is to make people's working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.

When we talk about this, we're not just talking about shipping the best features, we're talking about shipping features that both fit with function and form. We really want things that are going to work in your life, but that are also going to feel great to use. Things like catch up, where we've taken the the task of catching up on your unread messages, something nobody wants to do, and turn it into a delightful experience that feels as good as using a consumer app.

This is because at the core of slack is customer love. Now we started off as sort of a skunkworks shadow IT brand, and we grew because people just love to use us. And we've always said that this is going to be our most durable, long term advantage. As long as people love to use slack, we have a place in the market.

And how do we make that happen? Right. So it's nice to think about love. It's kind of a fuzzy thing, right? It's not very measurable.

We do this by changing how we build things. Everything in Slack is touched by our product principles. And I'm going to walk you guys through them.

So first take bigger, bolder bets. This is kind of obvious. You can see how it fits with the redesign. A redesign is a big bold bet, but this really means that we don't limit ourselves to thinking small. We think about the big picture, but we also want to hedge a little. We want to figure out how to get there in a way that feels safe. So how do we do that? Well, we seek the steepest part of the utility curve. Now, this is kind of cryptic. And it goes back to our founder, Stewart Butterfield, who really loved this metaphor.

But the idea is when you invest in something, you get a little bit of return when you invest a little bit and then you invest a little more, you get a little bit more return. At some point, your investment starts to have compounding interest, and you find a place where the thing isn't just good, it feels really great.

Think about, you know, a woodworker, sort of like chipping away with a planer. You know, at some point you find the beauty in the thing and that's the place we want to stop at.

We also prototype the path. I've been talking a lot with people about how we build it Slack here because we have all these different companies and Slack really does work together hand in hand product design, engineering.

We build new builds every day of our app. We try it in our hands. We're not afraid to do things and then have them not work and throw them out.

So we have a strong culture of using the app that we're building. We also want to be a great host. Now, that same Stuart, he used to talk about putting the towels on the bed when people came over, the idea that we would anticipate our users needs and put things in the places where they might not even think to find them. We want to be there before they even want, you know, for a towel or for something like that.

And then finally, don't make me think if the whole OS is shifting to Liquid Glass, why should Slack be different? Why should Slack be extra Slack? Why? I always tell my team like our job is not to teach people how to use our super cool software.

Our job is to help people get their job done, and the less that they have to think about it, the better. All right, so this is the background. This is how Slack thinks about product. And now Akshay is going to come up to talk about the team and the iOS announcement.

Thank you Jimmy. Hi, I'm Akshay, I'm the product director for mobile at Slack.

When iOS 26 was announced, it got our wheels spinning immediately.

You know that WWDC 2025 channel spun up. We are ready with Reactjs reacting live to the announcement, and we knew that the bar for feeling would be raised for a billion devices this fall when everyone updated their iPhones and iPads, and we wanted to stay at the forefront of this. And immediately, you know, we are live in channel. Our team is watching, reacting how far and wide and deep should we go with this redesign? Do we? The good news was that our mobile design language had already been evolving in this direction.

You can see the create menu animation and also the channel header menus. We already had this morphing style coming into Slack, and with iOS 26 we could do these animations everywhere and feel right at home.

And if we wanted to stay best in class, it was time to make a big, bold bet and redesign the whole app.

So well, that was Slack's opportunity, right? Could we embrace Liquid Glass and uplevel functionality at the same time? But wouldn't going more native affect our products brand? Well, not really, because in Slack our products brand shines through in the voice and tone of our copy.

The user customization and theming and of course, our emojis. The expressivity there. Let me show you an example.

So look at the header.

It shows up in every single workspace. And we tried a few different ideas. We prototyped and actually built out a few different ideas, tried them on device in our hand. We tried this concentric version that fit great into the device's shape, but that bottom edge didn't resolve quite well.

We tried a capsule version where the capsule kind of shrunk into the front camera housing, and it felt really nice. But when you're going back and forth between the conversation, that's kind of all light or all dark, and coming into this, it sometimes felt like a primary button. And that wasn't great either. And then we tried a gradient version that looks a lot like some of the Apple apps that you might have tried, like first Party, but with the variability of the content in our scroll views, it didn't work quite well with them either. So we landed on something that was closer to what we had previously, but could still accentuate Liquid Glass containers really nicely.

And it wasn't just Liquid Glass the new design. The new header had to accommodate theming as well, because theming in Slack is not just about esthetics. It's how users differentiate between their personal and professional workspaces when you're switching across them super, super quickly.

So cool. Liquid Glass would keep us at the forefront of delight, but what other product problems are we solving? Like, how else were we convincing leadership that this is a great idea? Well, Slack stands for the searchable log of all Communication and knowledge, and we weren't doing so well on that first part, right? We weren't doing so well on the search part of it.

Well, because search in Slack felt a little bit limited.

Imagine you're typing out an urgent reply and you want to look up some information. You're in a thread, but you've you got to go all the way back to home. You need to tap search. You need to find that DM. Find that channel. Find that canvas where the information is. And then go all the way back to where you were typing that reply originally. This isn't being a great host. We could do much better here. And this basic navigation needed to be easier. Well, we wanted to move search to the tab bar for this and have it be globally available. Users can jump around easily and iOS 26 kind of convinced us that we wanted to do this earlier, and we moved up our roadmap. And this made a ton of sense to leadership as well, because it just decreased the user learning curve. Every single Apple app would be getting updated in the fall, and users could learn this with all the other apps.

And as we add conversational search here next year, having that available from every single screen of the app. The power of AI available just like one tap away. That would make this feel even more powerful.

So we're locked in on the feeling and functionality upgrades, but we also had a few revelations along the way as we actually built and shipped all of this, right.

This was the version of the iPad redesign we wanted to ship, but a few years ago, we had taken the path of custom controls for the sidebar and navigation patterns. That kind of slowed us down on the engineering front. So we scoped this down in September. On day one, we made sure that users could utilize the windowing capabilities of iPadOS 26, but also the menu bar would be improved and users could really use that well.

On iPhone, we made sure that the most used elements were updated. When you're in the home tab every single day when you're inside a conversation, we wanted to make sure that that looked great. So the create menu, the tab bar.

Think of the conversation headers at the top of every single screen. The composer. All of those should look and feel great. So we really prioritized that the most important elements that people would be interacting with every single day for the day one release in October, we rolled out the bigger and riskier changes, the things that we knew would be a rewiring of muscle memory for our users. Right? So the glass header came out then, but also moving search to the tab bar. We really took our time to polish this and make sure it was a good experience.

And we used the opportunity to keep updating around the app so the huddle, navigation and controls also got updated October and we just keep shipping and polishing incrementally. Right. So in November we'll be updating the media player Chrome and the controls. And of course if you use canvases in Slack those controls will also get updated.

And that's kind of the idea that you don't have to start on day one and have the entire app updated. You can prioritize and think of the flows that your users are really going to spend their time in, and update it over time. You learn a lot because people will react to these changes, and you can optimize your roadmap based on that. And I'm happy to announce, well, here, landscape support is coming in December because when we use native controls, It really felt like we were swimming with the OS and the OS was propelling us forward. The tab bar in iOS 26 uses less space, and it makes landscape feel a little bit better every time you use it. And it also future proofs us using native controls. Future proofs us for as the platform evolves and new orientations are supported. Your app is dynamic across all of them, and I think that's what I want to land, that you could spend your time really optimizing the things that are unique to your app and the things that only your app can do, and use the OS as kind of an accelerant on the journey that you're taking your users on.

I really want to thank the slack team who made all of this possible. Some of them are sitting in the audience today. We're really quite proud of this update, and I hope you enjoyed this peek at how big redesigns happen at slack. Thank you.