How we built Notion-like Slash commands to improve messaging experience?

Introduction

This year kicked off with a celebration at Peerlist; we had shipped Inbox. I remember starting to build the feature back in June, but at that time, it was too early to build it, and long story short, it got shipped in December!

But why am I telling you this?

Any product or any feature is not complete or not perfect on day 1. But we must keep evolving it and making it more and more mature. For us, this has always been a continuous process, and hence it was now time to improve inbox! We recently shipped a beautiful and of its kind feature in the world of messaging, Inbox Shorthands, and today in this post I will share how we did it!

Let’s start with the problem we noticed

Peerlist is a Professional Networking platform, and people connect on Peerlist for many different reasons, like reaching out for a job, collaborating on a project, asking to get an introduction, reaching out for user interviews, etc. If you notice all the above reasons you will realize a common pattern, the exchange of repetitive information. All of these conversations include exchanging email addresses, calendar links, phone no, job links, etc.

Consider an example, you are having a conversation with a recruiter, you need to send your email id, or you want to send a calendar invite or meeting link. In this case, you have to find that link, copy + paste and then send it. We felt this is a repetitive process and took some efforts to automate it and make it more efficient.

But how?

Inbox Shorthands

Remember using slack or notion and getting access to different utilities with a simple slash /? Yes, exactly that, but within your Inbox!

With shorthand, you can create shortcuts for email, meeting links, and many more, that you might need to send multiple times in various conversations.

After coming up with this thought, we built a basic shorthand feature that creates a shortcut for your email address, phone, and calendar link. Though this was enough, we thought of going one step ahead! What if I am a recruiter and I want to quickly share job links for jobs I posted? Or I am a designer and want to use different calendar links for user interviews? So what if, along with some pre-defined shorthands, we also allow users to create their shorthands? And we added it!

How does it work?

While writing your message in composer, type / to activate Shorthands, and you get shorthand suggestions. You can also add new shorthands from inbox settings or directly from Manage Shorthands.

Ending note

There are some small features that add significant value to users, and I believe this is one of those! At Peerlist, our everyday efforts go into making professional networking more and more meaningful and simpler.

User feedbacks 🎉