It’s Skye! I’m a senior product designer
that builds durable design systems
and research-led experiences
for complex products.
Product Desgn & Sys / Slack Focus Rooms
Slack Focus Rooms
Top 6 finalist, 4 designers, 2 days desgning
New York City
Feature Prototype
“Align with the theme and focus on solving an accessibility challenge—this can include digital or physical accessibility, policy changes, or any other relevant area.”
With EVP / SVP panel judges from Product Design, Product Accessibility and Inclusive Design, Accounting, Ethical and Humane Use, and Software Engineering, success required a solution that was deeply human-centered, technically viable, and strategically impactful.
The total effort spent was one week from ideation to final demo, with the core design, prototyping, and validation compressed into a frenetic 2-day hackathon period. The primary hurdle was not execution, but strategic focus: narrowing a vast possibility space into one scoped, compelling objective under intense time pressure.
① Facilitate the initial discovery and synthesis session to converge on a single, powerful problem space.
② Define a clear, hackathon-sized objective and value proposition aligning with accessibility, innovation, and business themes.
③ Architect the UX/UI solution for a high-fidelity, persuasive prototype.
④ Orchestrate a rapid design process within the 2-day window, ensuring our solution was user-validated and demo-ready.
This was a hyper-accelerated, research-driven design sprint. My actions focused on rigorous framing and systematic execution.
Through that collaborative debate, the group applied key filters to narrow our focus: "Which problem is most pervasive?", "Where can Salesforce’s platform strengths have the greatest impact?", and "Where can we create the deepest human impact within a single week?"
This process moved the project decisively away from generic accessibility features toward a specific, meaningful problem space: the cognitive and emotional challenges faced by employees with ADHD in a high-paced, notification-driven digital workspace like Slack.
From this, our core objective unanimously became—to integrate support directly into the flow of work, and eliminate the need for yet another separate app—Slack Focus Rooms.
① Accessibility: Enhances accessibility for employees with ADHD by integrating emotional and focus management tools into Slack, reducing barriers to their success.
② Innovation: Transforms Slack into a holistic well-being platform, combining AI-driven emotional check-ins, task prioritization, and productivity management to address ADHD-specific challenges.
③ AI Integration: Seamlessly integrate AI for real-time emotional and productivity support, using NLP to prioritize tasks, suggest breaks, and break down complex tasks, improving focus and well-being.
Not only does Slack Focus Rooms answer the question, “Is this feature accessible?”, it also encourages the themes: empathy, inclusivity, and value:
- Is there design empathy between the feature and target audience?
- Can this feature have real impact? Success with small and large communities?
- Does this feature address the barriers to accessibility with/and beyond the target persona?
Even though we were working on early concepts and a lightweight prototype, having this foundation was essential—it gave us a baseline to anchor new ideas and ensure our designs felt grounded and extensible.
Given the hackathon context, the system didn’t need to be exhaustive; it simply needed to feel cohesive and believable—integrated as if it already existed within the product.
There was also an opportunity for me to create a standalone visual to support one of the key flows, illustrating the persona’s progression through the user journey.
In the flow below you will experience what it is like to be Mia, Slack Focus Room’s persona, as she goes through 6 main events in the story.
① Trigger: User feels overwhelmed in her day to day within the main Slack channel.
② Entry: One-click to launch a "Focus Room" from the sidebar.
③ AI Check-in: NLP-driven emotional pulse check ("How are you feeling?")
④ Task Prioritization: AI parses gathers and pinned messages/threads to suggest a highly project-specified priority to-do list, based on Mia’s choice of project.
⑤ Focus Mode: A simplified, minimal UI with timer, task breakdown, and "break" prompts.
⑥ Completion: Celebratory micro-interactions upon task completion.
Not only so, it’s her energy in those brainstorming session that help lead teams into innovative thinking. That, is where Mia’s strength shines brightest.
But Mia’s ADHD makes it hard for her to stay organized and focused on detailed-heavy tasks. This leaves her attention scattered and she missing multiple deadlines. Not only that, managing projects accoss multiple time zones adds to her stress. Mia’s also tried traditional time management tools but sadly none seem to be the right fit.
Let’s jump into a typical day in life of Mia...
《 It’s Monday morning, and Mia feels overwhelmed with a busy schedule. 》
《 This includes finalizing a social media campaign and attending a contents team meeting. 》
《 Needing a solution that fits her working style, Mia is introduced to the Focus Rooms in Slack, a tool that balances creativity and structure, which is easily accessible from the left navigation. 》
《 The Focus Room bot promptly asks if she’s working on anything specific. 》
《 Mia tells the bot she wants to focus on a specific task, so it suggests tasks from her lists and upcoming projects. She then chooses the social media campaign that is due in just a couple of days. 》
《 The Focus Room bot offers Mia the option to focus solely on her social media campaign tasks. 》
《 Mia then waits a few moments as the bot readys her Focus Room. 》
《 With features like text-to-speech, Mia can review lengthy documents without losing focus. 》
《 After 30 minutes of focused work, Mia recieves a reminder to take a break following the Pomodoro technique. 》
《 She’s engages in a one minutes breathing exercise with visual aid. 》
《 After a quick break, Mia jumps back in to her campaign. Here, Mia struggles with the proposal, so the bot ‘Ellie’ suggests reviewing data from a previous marketing campaign, and integrating it with her current one. Ellie summarizes the previous campaign data and offers suggestions for the next steps in creating a new one. 》
《 After gathering data, creating a new campaign, and forming a precise strategy, she checks off the task completed, and is ready to exit the Focus Room. Well done Mia! For the first time, Mia feels her ADHD is working not against, but for her. 》
《 With the Focus Room, Mia has found the ideal balance of creativity and structure, empowering not only her, but her whole team to thrive.
In addition that, her whole team loves that the new Mia is meeting deadlines consistently, and the quality of work being better than ever. 》
...and scene!
After presenting directly to the EVP/SVP panel, our team was selected as a Top 6 Finalist out of 20+ entries from all over the world. The solution was praised for its deep empathy, seamless integration, and strategic alignment with inclusive design principles. The judges highlighted our project's clarity in addressing a real, often invisible, barrier to accessibility (cognitive overload) and transforming a potential distraction (Slack) into a tool for empowerment.
Not only did Slack Focus Room’s high-fidelity, interactive prototype (built in Figma) demonstrate a fully-formed product experience, it also felt credible and designed for immediately integration
And forr me this was one of the top three, most enjoyable hackathons I’ve ever participated in. Although Slack Focus Rooms wasn’t chosen as the project for next steps—like full backend integration—I’m still honored as a Top 6 Finalist to have made it that far with just 1.5 days of designing components, scenes, and prototypes.
- Tim, Senior Director of Demo Studio
...panel judges, and my amazing fellow designers. Would not have done it without them fr fr (aka honestly).
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