Which would you rather use? They both do exactly the same thing, but one feels dull and the other feels electric and playful. The difference? Vibrant colors, a curvy sans-serif typeface, friendly icons, and smiling faces and emojis everywhere.

It Feels Different

Slack is also chock full of fun little interactions. The logo animates in a burst of colors as it loads; modals slide down from the top of the screen; changing teams flips the screen around like a deck of cards. Throughout the entire product, everything seems to playfully jump around and pop off the screen. Each of these interactions is designed not only to help the user understand what’s going on, but put a little smile on their face.

“We gave it the color scheme of a video game,

not an enterprise collaboration product.”

Have you ever walked into a house and had an indescribable feeling that it just feels cheap? A professional builder would walk in and give you a laundry list of shortcomings: uneven drywall, gappy hardwood floors, hollow-core doors, and cheap hardware. But most people just have a gut reaction. Like a well-built home, great software focuses on giving its users hundreds of small, satisfying interactions. A great transition in a mobile app gives us the same feeling we get from using a well-made door handle on a solid oak door — you may not be able to put your finger on it, but man, does the house ever feel well built. Slack is really fun to use. It feels like a well-built house.

It Sounds Different

But it’s not just how Slack looks and feels, it’s also about what it says. In Slack, every piece of copy is seen as an opportunity to be playful. Where a competitor might just have a loading spinner, Slack has funny quotes like, “Need to whip up a dessert in a hurry? Dump a bag of oreos on the floor and eat the oreos off the floor like an animal.” A strange little injection of fun into an otherwise boring day. Slack acts like your wise-cracking robot sidekick, instead of the boring enterprise chat tool it would otherwise be. Like Interstellar’s TARS, compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL9000:

Slack:

TARS: Everybody good? Plenty of slaves for my robot colony?

Their competitors:

HAL9000: I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission.

Even Slack’s Twitter account sounds more like an emoji-loving comedian than a billion dollar enterprise software company:

We humans have a tendancy to anthropomorphize just about everything, from our pets to inanimate objects. We think cars look like they are smiling, or that a lamp “looks lonely over there”. With Slack, a bubbly, bright UI, delightful interactions, and hilarious copywriting come together to create a personality. A personality which has triggered something powerful in its users: they care about it. They want to share it with others. It feels like a favorite co-worker, not a tool or utility.