Clay;
Work
Play
About
Resume ↗
LinkedIn ↗
Overview
What if Slack understood your company language?
Slackronyms is an imagined feature that gives quick definitions of your company-specific language in sent messages.
Drawing from my own frustration when I join a company and need to learn a new language, this projects aims to reduce the learning curve during onboarding and breaking down external teams siloed language.
Role
Sole designer
Timeline
2 weeks
2024
Tools
Figma
Cursorful
Jitter
1
New message
Clayton
5:10 PM
Thanks for checking out this case study!
Btw
do you have those
TPS
reports ready?
Hover the highlighted words
Context
Learning the company language is a struggle, even for veteran employees.
Have you ever paused a meeting to ask what OES meant?
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
GitHub, Word, and Excel, were the most common solutions, but still had friction
Having a dictionary doesn't mean you'll take the time to use it
I interviewed colleagues to reflect on their previous work locations and their approach to this problem. I consistently heard that organizations didn't want to build a dedicated internal tool or add "another app" to their workflow just to make defining acronyms easier. The common alternative was building makeshift word banks that felt clunky to use.
INCLUDE SOME KIND OF FLOW OF HOW MY SOLUTION CAN FIX THIS
"In slack -> 1 hover away" "exit task->open the web page or program-> CTRL F-> close application.)
The longer these bandaid solutions are in place the worse it gets
Hard to access
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.
Opportunity
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.
Features
Visually spotlighting acronyms the same as @mentions.
@Clayton
AFK
Drawing attention without being too loud.
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.
Filler text
you decide when to take off the training wheels.
When hovering over a "Slackronym", you can disable highlighting for specific unimportant words and view multiple definitions side by side for acronyms with more than one meaning.
Problem
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.
REFLECTION
I have nothing to reflect on, it's perfect, hire me Slack
Everyone hates reading, but they love conversations.
Balancing what we as a business want users to know V.S what a user actually wants to know is a difficult line. This project helped me learn how to use metaphors on boring language into legible content.
Sketching is for starting discussions, not beauty contests.
I typically jump into higher fidelity, but if I need to align a team on layout and abstract concepts, I’m now confident in running a workshop to rapid-fire ideas and align stakeholders from other teams.
Up next
Teaching Slack your work lingo
© 2025 Clayton Harding
Reading this was a test. You passed ツ