App surfaces
Create welcoming spaces for people to use your Slack app. Your Slack app can be made available in a range of surfaces. Surfaces are places where your app can express itself through communication or interaction with your users.
App Home
The App Home is a private, one-to-one space in Slack shared by a user and an app.
Present each of your users with a unique Home tab just for them, always found in the same place.
Once enabled, the Home tab is an ever-present space, retaining its content and state until the app chooses to update it. Read our guide to using the Home tab to learn more.
Although not every app needs to have a Home tab, the 'always-on' nature of the space makes it the most important surface available to Slack apps.
Compose the contents of your Home tab using Block Kit layout blocks and elements. Our guide to building block layouts will help you learn how.
Modals
Modals provide focused spaces ideal for requesting and collecting data from users, or temporarily displaying dynamic and interactive information.
Modals are prominent and pervasive β taking center stage in Slack ahead of any other interface element. They are are consequently short-lived and invoked only when a specific task is to be completed.
Modals contain one to three views that can be chained together to create complex, non-linear workflows. Read our modals overview to learn more.
Apps can only create modals in response to user invocation. A user can invoke your app through interactive features such as shortcuts.
Each view in a modal can be composed using Block Kit layout blocks and elements. Our guide to building block layouts will help you learn how.
Messages
App-published messages are dynamic yet transient spaces. They allow users to complete workflows among their Slack conversations.
Something invokes or provokes the app, and the app responds with a message. Further action can flow from that message, forming a conversational interface of potentially limitless complexity.
Apps can create messages whenever they want to, as long as they have the relevant permissions and access. Read our guide to sending messages from apps to learn more.
App-published messages can be composed using advanced text formatting and Block Kit layout blocks and elements. Our guide to composing messages will show you the full breadth of what is possible.
Take messages to the next level using interactive components like buttons and select menus. Learn how in our guide to creating interactive messages.
Using app surfaces together
App surfaces can also be used together to create a rich interactive experience for your users. For example, imagine the following Task App, which presents a task dashboard that resides in the app's Home tab:
- A user can click a button to add a task.
- The user is then presented with a modal to enter some plain text and select from a list of categories.
- Upon submitting, a message is sent to a triage channel elsewhere in Slack.
- Finally, a different user in the triage channel can click a button to claim that task.
Explore all the possibilities and get some tips and inspiration by reading our guides to planning Slack apps.