In September, Slack will launch a new design to help you focus and be more productive as you work. This is the spot to learn all about the new experience and what’s changed.

What's Changing

At first glance, Slack may look pretty different from what you’re used to seeing. Here’s where to find the channels, information, and tools you need to get to work.

  • Updated sidebar: Access unreads, drafts, and all your conversations from Home.
  • New views to organize work: Use DMs to view only your direct messages, and head to Activity for centralized notifications about mentions, reactions, threads, and more. Start a new message, huddle, canvas, or channel from the plus icon. 
  • New pop-out windows let you keep critical messages front and center. You can now open a conversation in a new window, whether a current conversation or one you have saved to respond to later. 

How will I get the update?

Slack will push the new updates to our workspace automatically between Tuesday, September 5 and Monday, October 2. Once we confirm the roll out has launched, we will send a follow up message. 

Improve focus even more with these tips:

  • Create Sections to group conversations by team, project or department and tailor their ordering to how you work best
  • Toggle ‘Unreads’ at the top of your Activity tab to only show unread messages
  • Update your Preferences and adjust the top of your sidebar to browse the items you use most

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Home All your conversations in both channels and DMs.
  • DMs A list of all DMs that can be searched and filtered.
  • Activity All your mentions, reactions, threads, and app notifications.
  • Later Reminders and saved items that can be marked as in progress, archived, or complete.
  • More Canvases, files, people and user groups, and more.

Instead of having a search bar at the top of the Slack app, we moved search alongside the views to keep all of the things you can do in Slack grouped together. Other than how you get there, search works just like it did before, and you can always use the keyboard shortcut (Mac) or (Windows/Linux).

Click the plus icon, then select Message. Or use the keyboard shortcut  (Mac) or  (Windows). The plus icon is also where you can create a new huddle, canvas, or channel.

Your profile and preferences menu are located in the bottom left corner of the Slack desktop app and Slack in a browser.

When you resize your Slack desktop app, we collapse the DMs, Activity, and Later views into More. You can always access them from More, or make your window bigger to see them.

Some legacy themes are no longer available. To choose a new theme, click your profile picture in the bottom left. Select Preferences from the menu, then click Themes. Feeling adventurous? Click Surprise me for a randomly-generated theme.

All workspaces that you are signed into can be found by clicking the workspace icon in the top left corner.

Access Slack support materials right through the Slack client

You can access Slack’s help and learning resources right in the Slack desktop app or Slack in a browser. Just click the help icon in the top right corner (desktop) or bottom left corner (browser).