Slacktivity: Scaling Slack for Large Organizations

Blaine Lewis, Justin Matejka, Tovi Grossman, George Fitzmaurice

Abstract: Group chat programs, such as Slack, are a promising and increasingly popular tool for improving communication among collections of people. However, it is unclear how the current design of group chat applications scales to support large and distributed organizations. We present a case study of a company-wide Slack installation in a large organization (>10,000 employees) incorporating data from semi-structured interviews, exploratory use, and analysis of the data from the Slack workspace itself. Our case study reveals emergent behaviour, issues with exploring the content of such a large Slack workspace, and the inability to keep up with news from across the organization. To address these issues, we designed Slacktivity, a novel visualization system to augment the use of Slack in large organizations and demonstrate how Slacktivity can be used to overcome many of the challenges found when using Slack at scale.

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