HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y

This is the TED Talk you're talking about.

⬐ jonplackett

THANKS! Yes this is the one!

(The incorrect Barry Schwartz one I posted is excellent too though!)

Target a well-defined sub-market that Slack currently serves and serve it better by targeting it more precisely [1]. As demonstrated by the comments on this thread, there are a lot of people that all think that Slack needs to go in different directions, which agrees with my own personal observations of Slack's utility to different people on different teams. Slack is a simple, general solution that works well enough for a lot of teams and a lot of people. If you want to disrupt it, I doubt you're going to be able to improve it across the board point-for-point, so in stead you want to target a subgroup that's sort of well serviced by Slack but could stand to have tweaking done to fit it to their needs better.

To collect some examples from this thread:

* Some engineering teams need default UI that encourages larger message sizes so people aren't writing strings of tiny messages all the time. This _clearly_ isn't something that everybody wants or needs - a lot of brainstorming goes on in my Slack chats, for example, and that means tiny ideas have to go out quickly and easily - but it's a reasonable submarket to target. This would also lead to a larger emphasis on text formatting and composition, better controls on notification and addressing, better searching and filtering and quoting/reply/threading, and other tools that improve the power of an individual message at the expense of usability and speed - move it more toward the email/forum topic side of things.

* Some teams feel that the existing UI already gets in their way too much. Improve the ease of use and speed of message composition and flow of discussion. Not sure how you'd do this exactly; Slack is already pretty well optimized in this direction. Step one here would probably be to hire a whole building full of UX engineers and optimize the crap out of every single interaction anybody ever does with the UI. Microoptimization on top of microoptimization on top of microoptimization, like Apple did with the groundbreaking early IOSs.

* Specifically cater to enterprise clients with security requirements. Better technical details for security and access control, make it compliant with regulations with particular security and auditing and access control requirements. Provide a powerful system for per-channel access controls that interoperates with something like LDAP, maybe provide a system where you can only talk to people in different groups if you've managed to inherit some permissions that let you talk to them otherwise everything they say never appears on your screen, tag everything with a secrecy level and control access intelligence-agency style, etcetera.

And so on and so forth.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y&feature=yout...

People have no idea what they want or need, or even what they like. Observe the following empirical evidence as presented by respected marketer Malcolm Gladwell:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y

Also, that bit about a heart valve is a sly reference to a famous polymath-type who invented a revolutionary kind of heart valve as just one part of a long and incredibly varied career. Can anyone remember who this is? Google is giving me nothing.

Depending on your market size/slice it's possible in a good sized company to have folks that are so well entwined in that community that they can help give feedback about their favorite products. Part of the problem with marketing is that people don't know what they want. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y