Slack transformed business communication, but lately people have been criticizing it for creating a culture of distraction and interruption, fragmenting organizational memories, and breaking down when your team gets beyond a certain size.

It's clear that always-on real-time communication isn't viable for most organizations, and better alternatives to email and forums need to exist. Apps like TwistApp: http://twistapp.com/ and Slite: slite.com have popped up in response to these gaps, offering with alternatives to real-time communication, with twistapp focusing on threaded conversations and Slite focusing on documents.

The idea for the Team Discussion App, from hereon referred to as TDA, is to make organizational communication more manageable by grouping discussions into threads, promoting thoughtful communication, and helping teams organize their discussions better.

Threads instead of chat

TDA will take interface cues from Slack but instead of a real-time chat, have a threaded discussion model like a forum.

Hierarchical channels will help with organizing threads while still making it easy to get an overview of what's happening in your team. In this example, we can see that the user is looking at the #design channel, but can see the posts made in sub-channels like #marketing and #product:

Mini Apps

Unlike a Forum though, your posts can contain mini-apps, like a poll:

Or this Q&A app, which has the same functionality as Stackoverflow:

Lots of potential

Mini-apps have a lot of potential to smooth communication and create better records for the future. For example, thanks to the Question mini-app, as time passes your organization will accumulate an easily searchable archive of problems and solutions, reducing the need to answer the same questions over and over again or maintain a special FAQ.