Ditching word docs for a built in acronym dictionary.
Overview
Slackronyms is an imagined feature for Slack that helps when breaking down company jargon as they naturally appear in Slack messages. These passive descriptions aim to reduce the learning curve when onboarding and breaking down team silo language.
Role
Product Designer
Project Type
Tools
Figma
Jitter
Context
Learning the company language is a struggle, even for well-versed employees.
The longer acronyms get used in the workplace the less often you see it spelled out. This disrupts productivity if you're constantly hunting down what these terms mean.
My own personal experience feeling lost, confused and amassing a collection of sticky notes with business lingo made me think there has to be a better approach to communicating company language.
Problem
During interviews, it was clear organizations don't want to add "another app" to their workflow just to make defining acronyms easier. However the alternative is using makeshift word banks. These word banks are often not synced to the cloud. This means their definitions are hard to update, likely out of date, or copies with alternative definitions exist in the company, resulting in a disjointed language glossary.
Image
Example of internal acronym documentation.
The longer these bandaid solutions are in place the worse it gets
Not easily accessible
Locating definitions is tedious. You either scroll through long pages or using a keyword search (Ctrl+F). To store these documents you take up space on your desktop or bookmark bar, it's no better than pulling a dictionary from a shelf.
Lack of ownership
Since these documents aren't officially being managed by the company, there is a lack of process and nobody bears responsibility for maintaining them.
Difficult to scale
As the organization grows so does the language, there's more opportunities to miss adding new words and keeping old unused ones, leaving new employees confused.
What if we…
With 200k+ organizations already using Slack,
what if we make a new feature for enterprise plans?
With this approach, organizations don't need to adopt to a new tool and Slack gets a unique competitive feature to market.
Introducing
A built in dictionary hosted on Slack. Whenever you see org-specific language you simply hover to get a definition of the acronym.
Features
Spotlighting acronyms the same way we do with @mentions.
@Clayton
TPS
I wanted to ease users into this feature with recognizable visuals so people would already know they could interact with it the same way they would with an @mention.
Video
Hovering a "Slackronym"
Image
Acronyms with less than 1 definition
Manage outdated acronyms and approve new ones.
What makes Slack so appealing is how you can customize your workspace. Slackronyms should feel the same way. With system-admin roles, you can approve new acronyms and enable/disable them across the org.
Video
Managing your slackronyms list
Putting fun into functional?
This was a fun concept project to test how I would approach feature exploration and integrate it into an existing platforms ecosystem without feeling out of place.
© 2025 Clayton Harding