Communication shouldn't break the canvas.
Remote designers lose hours every week to context-switching. Slack lives in one window, Figma in another, and the back-and-forth between them — to read feedback, search for a comment, find the right channel — fragments the creative work that depends on uninterrupted focus. The cost isn't just time; it's the quality of the work itself.
“How might we redesign Slack so communication is a quieter layer of the design workflow, instead of an interruption?”
Two competitive spaces. One missing tool.
I ran a competitive analysis across two categories — design collaboration tools (Figma, InVision, Miro) and corporate communication tools (Microsoft Teams, Pumble, Chanty) — scored on whether each eliminated the need for multiple tools, supported real-time collaboration, reduced repetitive tasks, and worked for ideation. Every tool nailed one or two of these. None nailed all four for the remote designer specifically. The opportunity wasn't another tool — it was making the existing one less in the way.
To ground the analysis in lived experience, I interviewed two practicing designers — one corporate, one startup. Two patterns emerged:
- Channel sprawl.Designers surf through dense, vague channel lists to find one piece of info.
- Window juggling.Constant alt-tab between Slack and Figma kills momentum, especially on smaller screens.
Christina & Matthew
- Christina — UI/UX designer at Amazon, hybrid. Juggles many projects and meetings; struggles to relocate feedback after long weekends.
- Matthew — UI/UX designer at a startup, fully remote. Fewer projects, but constant manager check-ins; awkward window transitions break his flow.
Two features, both designed to keep the designer's eyes on their canvas.
- Pop-Up Messaging Tab. A compact Slack window that floats over the design tool, so reading and responding to feedback never requires leaving the canvas.
- Pinned Channels. A user-defined surfacing layer at the top of the channel list, so the channels you're actively working in are one click away instead of buried in alphabetical sprawl.
Wireframe → mid-fi → high-fi, tested every round.
I mapped both features into user flows, then prototyped through three fidelity passes, testing each round on the same designers I'd interviewed. The biggest iteration came from testing: collapsing the pop-up's chrome so it didn't feel like a second app — it had to feel like an accessory to Figma, not a competitor for attention.
Two things stuck with me.
- Don't get attached to your first design. The first version of the pop-up tab was much heavier than the final — until a tester said it felt like another window to manage. Letting that feedback override my own preference made the design real.
- Anchor every design decision in real user data. Without that anchor, "this looks better" becomes the loudest argument in the room — and it's almost always the wrong one.