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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

#61

Post by skavi »

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…

I noticed the job postings you had open were for platform devs working with the Swift/Kotlin rather than Web stuff. Does that mean that you’ve built native apps for each platform?

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

#63

Post by mortenjorck »

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…

The choice to use color as a primary axis for differentiating users in a thread is interesting. I can see the appeal in it – disentangling voices at a glance is potentially high-value in a group conversational UI – but it also comes at a pretty high cost in terms of visual complexity, as evidenced by some of the reactions.

Another drawback to assigning colors to users is that you tend to run out quickly: Do those users carry their bubble colors across the entire workspace? If they do, in a company of more than ten or so people, you end up with repeats, and threads where everyone will be the same or similar colors. Conversely, if colors are assigned dynamically per thread, it will be confusing switching context and having the same person appear in different colors!

If I were designing something like this, I'd look into other axes on which to vary chat bubbles to promote differentiation. Avatars are a reliable source of high-entropy variance, so maybe you could utilize them in a novel way. It could even be a generating a combination of colors using a scheme similar to the old iTunes album cover color matching.

Anyway, it's an exciting product, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes!

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

#64

Post by nstart »

atoav wrote: post #42

As somebody who is often said to be right in the age bracket who should like things like these, I think in most cases I'd prefer email over this. This is why: friction is not always a bad thing. Having to print out that mail twice before putting it into the envelope stops you from sending stupid stuff – it would just not be worth the effort, or you'd reconsider before you bring it to the mail. This means also frictio…

yes to this a 1000 times! It's amazing how our familiarity with certain interfaces changes our behaviour too. Anything that resembles a chat box and a "hit enter to send" encourages chat like behaviour. No matter whether it's threaded or otherwise. Interfaces like Jira or other software management tools which have ceremony involved before actually creating a task encourage people to think through things fully before hitting create.

I'm a huge advocate of async work especially in remote teams. Every real time chat about an importan decision has felt chaotic as people type message after message adding details and leaving out others which causes this long back and forth between people. The end result is always a mess leaving it to someone to go through it again and summarize information.

Messaging is just a bad format for focused conversations. Ceremony and friction are, like you say, a good thing. The physical parallel to this is sending in a request for a meeting with some details as opposed to just walking up to someone to chat with an idea you just had.

Not to say messaging is bad for everything. But it's definitely not good for calm, slow, focused conversations.

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

#65

Post by nerdponx »

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…

I used MS Teams at work, which already has this "thread-first" method of communication.

MS Teams is garbage overall. But the threaded-only chat style is actually kind of nice. It's easy to keep conversation threads in order, and people tend to veer less into off-topic banter. Plus I can just keep IRC and Discord open in the background for banter.

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

#66

Post by jv22222 »

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?

It's horses for courses, but for me, threaded IM is a _terrible_ UX.

Real time conversations gets hidden as so much is buried in the the real time thread.

But for regular forums threads are perfect and make total sense.

Similarly, it seems like a terrible UX to have IM style conversation on a blog or news site.

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

#67

Post by goatherders »

nstart wrote: post #64
atoav wrote: post #42

As somebody who is often said to be right in the age bracket who should like things like these, I think in most cases I'd prefer email over this. This is why: friction is not always a bad thing. Having to print out that mail twice before putting it into the envelope stops you from sending stupid stuff – it would just not be worth the effort, or you'd reconsider before you bring it to the mail. This means also frictio…

yes to this a 1000 times! It's amazing how our familiarity with certain interfaces changes our behaviour too. Anything that resembles a chat box and a "hit enter to send" encourages chat like behaviour. No matter whether it's threaded or otherwise. Interfaces like Jira or other software management tools which have ceremony involved before actually creating a task encourage people to think through things fully before…

I'd pay for a slack add-on that gave my folks "message tokens". If they used a token it would send a message to me and then, as soon as I replied, if would open a 3 minute window for us to correspond. Then the window would close and the convo would be over. 3 tokens per day per employee. would cut down on the annoying stuff.

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

#68

Post by protomyth »

atoav wrote: post #42

As somebody who is often said to be right in the age bracket who should like things like these, I think in most cases I'd prefer email over this. This is why: friction is not always a bad thing. Having to print out that mail twice before putting it into the envelope stops you from sending stupid stuff – it would just not be worth the effort, or you'd reconsider before you bring it to the mail. This means also frictio…

I have a weird observation about the friction of e-mail. I think a high percentage of the friction comes from having to think up a subject. It seems that step, if required, forces some extra thought. It changes things a bit if you don't enforce subjects.

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

#70

Post by atoav »

protomyth wrote: post #68
atoav wrote: post #42

As somebody who is often said to be right in the age bracket who should like things like these, I think in most cases I'd prefer email over this. This is why: friction is not always a bad thing. Having to print out that mail twice before putting it into the envelope stops you from sending stupid stuff – it would just not be worth the effort, or you'd reconsider before you bring it to the mail. This means also frictio…

I have a weird observation about the friction of e-mail. I think a high percentage of the friction comes from having to think up a subject. It seems that step, if required, forces some extra thought. It changes things a bit if you don't enforce subjects.

I think this is spot on. The subject alone makes it different
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