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Show HN: Quill – Messaging for teams that focus

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Re: Show HN: Quill – Messaging for teams that focus

#31

Post by luddep »

tobych wrote: post #29

I am, it seems, in the market for this. But... I don't want to be alerted unless something is important and urgent . I was taught at college to use that distinction.[1] Not seeing the word "urgent" in the copy on the front page made me think the authors don't appreciate this. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower... At the risk of sounding like that bloke who wrote about how he wants to be…

(I work at Quill.) Yes! That's exactly how we think about it. By default, @-mentions _will not_ notify you, and instead end up in your activity feed. And if something is truly urgent, we have priority notifications (!!-mentions) which will send a notification. (They have a higher cost, and make it very clear that it will cause disruption on the other end.)

We think of it as bringing the way people behave in person, online. If you have headphones on, working away, and I have a low priority question, I'll find you later. But if I just brought down prod, I urgently need to reach you :)

Re: Show HN: Quill – Messaging for teams that focus

#33

Post by btown »

luddep wrote: post #13
atonse wrote: post #6

Am I missing something here? It talks about focus but has an extremely busy UI with colors and icons in your face all the time. Maybe it's better to actually use it than see the screenshots?

(I work at Quill.) Everything in Quill is a thread -- which is quite a big shift from an IRC-like firehose (even with optional threading.) We've found the shift to have threading by default creates a behavior where you opt into just the conversations you care about, and don't have to skim through hundreds of messages to find what's relevant (or, say, replies to an earlier conversation.) May be hard to get across the…

How does it work as a knowledge base? I like the idea that, like Notion, it has a hierarchy (both the explicit team hierarchy, and enforced threading within each subteam). I could see each team's feed becoming a stream of ad-hoc documentation for each of their user stories etc. If you can make a search experience that's more like Slack than Notion, that would be really powerful.

Separately, I'll agree that busy colors in a UI will limit adoption (particularly for anyone in enterprise or startups with a strong visual-design culture). You don't want Quill to clash with the visual work people are doing. Perhaps having the ability to have multiple "color intensity" themes, and a more muted scheme as an option, would let you expand your audience.

Good luck! Plenty of these tools but it looks like you're pushing the boundaries!

Re: Show HN: Quill – Messaging for teams that focus

#35

Post by wpietri »

lancesells wrote: post #30
drcongo wrote: post #25

On top of my own company's, I'm constantly signed in to 21 Slack workspaces mostly belonging to clients, and the endless notifications are starting to become a real problem, particularly when people use @channel or @here all the time. Add into that the Slack's notification sounds are some of the most grating noises to hit my ears since Skype's. If I'm concentrating on a complex task and Slack starts going off I come…

Turn off sounds and notifications?

That can work for some slacks and some channels. But with others, not so much. When you're being paid to pay attention to client needs, there's only so much you can get away with.

Re: Show HN: Quill – Messaging for teams that focus

#36

Post by wutbrodo »

ahuang wrote: post #22
me551ah wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC is very different from teams. IRC is a public server and each channel could have 100s of members which leads to an unmanageable firehose. Are you sure the same problem is also applicable to teams which are going to be much smaller than an irc channel and wouldn't be as busy as IRC? A private channel with a subset of team members wouldn't be the same as a public irc channel.

(I work at Quill). We've found threading to work really well with teams as small as 3. (2, probably not.) In professional contexts, conversations tend to be about specific topics -- someone posts a GitHub issue, bug report, feature discussion, etc, vs say a more social conversation that is less structured. It's a way to keep track of the conversations you're having instead of a stream of consciousness (with multiple…

> We've found threading to work really well with teams as small as 3. (2, probably not.) I

For what it's worth, my company is (unfortunately) very chat-heavy, and I use threads in two person conversations fairly often. Sometimes conversations branch off of other conversations.

Re: Show HN: Quill – Messaging for teams that focus

#38

Post by flixic »

Looks interesting! I'll echo some other comments about the visual noise. From what I can see, each person has their own color and it is stable across contexts. It's a curious design solution. There are certainly some things gained from this - some sort of visual familiarity of names. But it makes using color for other purposes a lot more difficult, and I'm not sure it's a worthy tradeoff.

I'm also really curious how you'll handle End-to-End Encryption. The only good alternative in this space is Keybase, and even their UX has some ways to go. Do you plan to use MLS?

Re: Show HN: Quill – Messaging for teams that focus

#40

Post by dewey »

Haven't used it but what I like from the features is that it combines Slack and Discord (with the voice rooms, that's currently (now that we are a forced remote company) a bit annoying that we have to use third party tools just to add this voice channel functionality to Slack.
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