Information Availability V.S. Discoverability

See

Example

Slack makes information Available but not Discoverable 🔖

A lot of Slack's talk says that it's far more transparent but this is only half true. For true transparency you need both Information Availability and Information Discoverability.

Information Availability

If you know a small piece of common information you what you want to find, and there's a good search term you can think of chances are you'll find it in Slack! Like if you want to know, "When's the date that I need to register for health insurance?" Chances are if you search for "insurance" you'll find it.

Information Discoverability

If there's a piece of information that you don't know you want to know about, such as rumblings of the company starting on a new app, or a quiet announcement that a co-worker is sick, or another team brainstorming ideas that you might want to weigh in on.

The only way is to read everyting driven by a strong sense of FOMO. There's no, "Top headlines" for Slack despite it being a "Newsfeed". This leads to an

Slack is better than Email, but still struggles

Slack is an improvement over email in Information Availability, but it still has the problem of people being shy of public channels, which leads people to ask questions in direct messages and private channels.

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