The user’s “investment” in the Slack desktop client (as well as the mobile app) is a huge strength. The company wants to maximize usage and therefore opportunities to form the Slack habit. Slack understands the power of getting users to invest. Users put in a bit of work into the product to make it more useful and therefore increase the likelihood of using it in the future.

Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, talks about how users become invested in the Slack ecosystem: This is why Slack is so sticky: they’ve combined support for multiple teams with a desktop client that sits apart from the web browser.

So Slack isn’t just easier to use in multiple teams, it’s more attractive because you can justifiably have multiple teams.” – Jamie Lawrence Who ran non-work Hipchat or Campfire instances? No one. “Before Slack you wouldn’t think of using group chat apps in non-work contexts. The client allows people to see all of their Slack teams in one interface. People are joining multiple Slack teams: they’ll have one for their running club, one for their local startup scene, one for their coworking office, etc. For users with two monitors, the Slack app is running in one of their displays for most of the day. It allows a user to be signed into all of their Slack teams at once.Įven though Slack is a web application, most people run it in the desktop client.There are two elements to pay attention to here: So why did our members want us to switch? The answer to that question is in this screenshot: Both applications are web based, have an interface inspired by IRC, feature useful integrations, and support emojis. Functionally, Slack and Kato are very similar. The reason our members wanted to switch wasn’t because of features. We’d started with Kato because it was free, but members soon started to complain:

My coworking office recently had to decide which group chat application we were going to use.

Slack web chat