Does it really make sense to move more work to chat?
By: Maxim Leonovich
Tags: Chatops, Slack, Productivity, Collaboration, Chatbots

Behind ChatOps, there is an idea that you can bring the most of your day-to-day digital operations right into the company chat and run them from there. Doing everything from one place sounds like a good idea but hold on. Wouldn’t it add even more noise to a place that is already considered the biggest source of distraction by many? Most definitely, your Slack/MS Teams/[platform of choice] won’t get quieter after you add a bunch of apps, but hey, there are benefits to it as well, and some of them are big! Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Here’s what our friends at Mio say: We conducted our own research and the headline stat was that 91% of businesses use at least 2 messaging platforms

Built-in collaboration

This is one of the most significant points that make ChatOps so unique and compelling — no matter what you do, collaboration is always built into it. Discuss notifications right in the threads underneath them, comment on tickets, elaborate on polls — all that is easier when you don’t have to switch windows every time you want to say something. With the introduction of things like shared channels in Slack, you can even invite your customers to the dialog and let them interact with your internal systems, which generally don’t support this way of sharing.

Unified UX.

All modern chat platforms provide a way to build flexible UX for bots, that goes way beyond a basic conversation. Slack apps, for example, can have buttons, dropdowns, dialogs, and, with the introduction of the Home Tab, entire UI pages with complex interactions.

New App Home UI mockup

Is it flexible enough and offers perfect UX for each possible workflow? Umm, perhaps not. Can it be clunky and ugly at times? Yeah, I think so. However, it all doesn’t matter for the vast majority of the workplace apps that we use infrequently. Expenses, benefits, approvals, surveys, candidate reviews, helpdesk requests — everyone needs to deal with these things only occasionally. Still, the total time spent by all people in the company figuring out how to interact with each new system is enormous! Making them all look the same, behave the same, and live in the same place saves a ton of time across the company.

No need to log in

Companies use Okta, OneLogin, and other SSO providers, but they only work if the app supports SSO, and then you still need to click buttons to actually sign in. In the corp chat, you’re already logged in, the app already knows who you are, and you can get straight to business without foreplay.

Actionable notifications

While a regular app can send you an email notification with a call to action, it still can’t be more than a link that leads you to a web page where you need to log in first and then… you know the drill. Chatbot notifications are much more direct — because there’s no need to authenticate, and because UI controls are built-in, you can react to a notification right at the moment you see it, and that’s a huge productivity boost. Just remember how many times you decided not to react to a notification just because you knew you would need to go to another system, potentially recover your password, the other system could be slow and bulky, etc. Chat apps make simple actions really simple, and hence more people want to perform them.

Fewer context switches

We all know how expensive context switches are, and we all continuously at least between the chat and the browser. Why add more? While going from coding to filing an expense report via a chatbot is still a context switch, it’s confined to an app you’re already using (the chat), it’s already “warm” in your brain, and the switch is much cheaper this way.

Simplified discovery

The time we spend just looking for the right systems often exceeds the time we actually use them. Example: I recently spent 10 minutes digging through my inbox, looking for a link that points to the system, my co-working space uses for booking conference rooms. It was not directly mentioned in the email, but rather in a document, stored in a yet another system. Of course, I’ve bookmarked that link since then, but the point is that we all spend significant time just searching for the entrance into different systems, not even using them.

Chat apps, at least, all live in the same place [the chat]. They often belong to the same channels as the people whom you’d want to talk to when you had given up looking for the login link. E.g., HR bots live in the #hr channel, alongside all the HR people, and IT bots reside in #it, next to the guy who fixes your printer. Some chatbots can even automatically reveal themselves when the context is relevant.

Great, but doesn’t it make the chat even more distractive?

The biggest concern about platforms like Slack becoming an “operating system for work” is that they’re designed to steal our attention, sometimes to the point that they disrupt the actual work. Considering this, adding more apps to an attention hog like Slack doesn’t help at all. There’s, however, a trade-off that you get in the form of more work being done because the work is now simpler to do. I have a few big hopes for the long-term future that should solve the distractiveness problem:

New design patterns will emerge that will help better separate important information from less important from noise. For example, merely introducing a second class of “less important” notifications with a less screaming bubble style could already help a bit.

AI will catch-up and help a lot in surfacing “stuff that I want to see” from the rest of the mess. This, of course, has a danger of forming filter-bubbles around people, just like the ones we have in large-scale social media platforms, but that’s a different story. Our own OneBar.io is a part of this AI movement, and we’re looking for better ways to extract meaningful information from Slack logs automatically.

People will adapt — people always adapt. Our brain is very susceptible to short reward-loop “attacks,” which produce enormous amounts of dopamine and make us go crazy about social networks and online video games. The good thing is that over time our brain learns that the reward is not real and stops paying attention. We’ve all learned somehow not to open spam emails and not to pick up calls from unknown callers. I think we’ll learn to deal with apps like Slack in a similar way, and only use the productive part of them.

“The Hook” framework is behind the world’s most addictive apps

Which Slack apps do we use at OneBar

OneBar is a tiny team, and we don’t have many of the corporate functions that larger companies have. Still, even at our size, we already have many Slack apps, which are parts of our daily workflow.

All incident reports (Rollbar + Sentry) come to Slack where we discuss them, tag people who should take action, or decide to ignore.

All live chats (HubSpot + Intercom) are hooked up to Slack too, and we often talk to our customers by starting a thread in the #chat-with-customers channel.

channel. We use /zoom a lot; it’s just the easiest way to start a meeting.

a lot; it’s just the easiest way to start a meeting. We’ve also used Polly a few times to run quick surveys in our users’ workspace.

We used to use Trello for bug tracking but recently switched to an even simpler workflow. We just throw bugs-reports into relevant feature-channels, work on them in threads, and delete the original message when the bug is fixed.

Our own app updates: sign-ups, upgrades, in-app feedback, uninstalls — everything comes to a separate Slack channel and gets monitored there.

We have a few custom-built tools that allow us to broadcast a message from our workspace to all our customers (via @onebar bot)

Finally, of course, we use OneBar every day! All technical how-to’s, how-does’, and what-is’ are stored there and are easily accessible in Slack. We also put meeting notes, user-call summaries, and various message templates in OneBar. Even though I’m biased, I honestly can’t imagine storing all this information elsewhere with the same level of convenience and accessibility.

Do you embrace ChatOps or oppose it? Post your story in the comments!