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Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

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Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#231

Post by danShumway »

userbinator wrote: post #225
danShumway wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying that all change should be avoided. I'm saying that all change is an annoyance to your users, all change has a cost. So if you do want to force your users to change, provide them with an escape hatch so professionals can avoid that, or be really certain that the change is genuinely making things better. Imagine that every change you're making is like hitting your user in the face with a brick. If you're…

I'm saying that all change is an annoyance to your users, all change has a cost. Except for the changes like "reduce memory usage" or "fix crash when X happens" --- those are true improvements.

Good clarification -- when I talk about change, I mean a workflow change. XKCD aside, I don't believe that every code change breaks someone's workflow, or at least I believe that some code changes break workflows in such a minimal way that none of your users will care.

To expand on your point, how many bugs and crashes do we tolerate in software simply because rebuilding features has priority over refining features or handling more edge-cases?

Slack's new interface isn't just different, it's buggier. Stuff like copy-paste is broken. So it's not just that we have to adapt to a new workflow, we're also accepting a lower-quality piece of software that is less reliable than what we had before. And in theory a refactor or rewrite might be so valuable that I could tolerate that, but I don't see that value here.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#232

Post by frandroid »

cortesoft wrote: post #186
hazz99 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> online platform service providers not understanding their users and their workflows In regards to the Reddit redesign, I think the people complaining that "they ignore their users" are stuck inside a bit of a bubble. I have a lot of friends who recently discovered the site, and they much prefer the redesign to the old one. I forgot where I read it, but I vaguely remember stats backing this up, or at least increase…

Reddit also let's you still use the old version, which is great

Exactly... You don't have to expire the old front-end, you can build a new front-end on top of the old API, maybe introduce a few new functions in the API to support both old and new.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#233

Post by Const-me »

danShumway wrote: post #139
jakebasile wrote: post #19

Reading their non-replies on Twitter feels like I'm reading something specifically designed to piss me off. Smarmy apologies, low empathy, cocksure of how correct their vision of a chat service should be. This one in particular[1]: > The goal is for workflows to evolve, but we realize change can be a bit of a pain. "Stupid peasant, we are only here to help you. Once you see the glorious vision we have you will thank…

> The goal is for workflows to evolve This exchange is a pretty good summation of one of the biggest purely practical reasons why I'm so obsessive about tools, and why I'm so willing to put up with the initial cost of learning systems like Linux and Vim/Emacs. Outside of fundamentally better workflow improvements, most professional fields don't randomly change their tools. If you gave a professional artist a new penc…

> like Markdown that allowed me to build up decades of muscle memory

Speaking of muscle memory, I still remember these … and  — from the time when most web apps understood HTML. Too bad they stopped…

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#234

Post by piyushpr134 »

"Slack is terrible" - There I fixed it.

It is not a troll comment. I tried to get my org to move to slack from whatsapp groups. People (non tech) love them flexibility and UI etc. However they were quickly disenchanted due to the various issues with the system like it eats a few GBs on desktop, push notifications don't work on some phones, some UI elements are very irritating (when you upload a picture, it vanishes to a progress bar, trying to type anything with a / makes slack believe I am typing a command etc etc).

We all went back to WA groups

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#235

Post by nwallin »

Swizec wrote: post #157
danShumway wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The goal is for workflows to evolve This exchange is a pretty good summation of one of the biggest purely practical reasons why I'm so obsessive about tools, and why I'm so willing to put up with the initial cost of learning systems like Linux and Vim/Emacs. Outside of fundamentally better workflow improvements, most professional fields don't randomly change their tools. If you gave a professional artist a new penc…

> Only in the software industry would someone tell me that my professional tools should change because change is inherently good Translation: "we're paying all these engineers and product managers and they need something to do"

The crazy thing to me is that if they rolled out a native desktop app that was maybe a little bit lacking in features and used ~20MB RAM and had this particular misfeature in it and called it beta, people would applaud them for it, especially here on HN.

Instead they spent actual time, effort, and money making their product worse.

My company has certain deficiencies, but one of our core principals is that we'll never break a workflow, even if the workflow is dumb, even if the "feature" is actually a bug that an enterprising user abused in a way we didn't anticipate. The bad news is that we're saddled with a ton of legacy crap that can't be rewritten. The good news is that we've grown into one of those behemoths that dominates a niche specialized industry and won't be unseated by a product that is only, say, twice as good as ours. It's not as fun as iterating fast and breaking things, but the low stress is nice.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#236

Post by xref »

abbadadda wrote: post #169
Twirrim wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IIRC there was a time when Confluence axed their markup, and inevitably a table or a template would get completely screwed, and there was nothing you could do but recreate it. TERRIBLE design. There was. I was using Confluence at the time, and it broke a lot of things. There was a wonderful filed bug at the time with a lot of angry people on it, where they promised to bring the old mechanism back as an option, and…

Atlassian Jira/Confluence SUUUUUCKS. They have given up on making anything better. I try to do as much as possible on Markdown files in a GitLab repo using Atom's Markdown preview (e.g., documentation). Gliffy diagrams are still OK.

Same, README.md for most everything I can. Searching for info in the repo is also more productive than the search nightmare in jira/confluence.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#237

Post by hunter2_ »

_bxg1 wrote: post #207
gkoberger wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually love that drafts are brought to the top; it keeps things from getting lost for me. I even sometimes will write one character as a reminder I need to finish. But still, I understand your frustration. That being said, search makes it really easy to solve this. I rarely do anything other than Cmd+K/Ctrl+K, and type a character or two. For me, it's become second nature, and I never find myself searching around…

The infuriating thing is that these would be some of the easiest possible features to add a toggle for. There's nothing wrong with liking drafts that float to the top, or rich text editing, but when a significant portion of your users is extremely upset about a tiny UX behavior like this, even if they end up being a minority, there's no excuse to not add an opt-out.

The real problem is that companies seem to think that users hate toggles. It's extremely hard for me to understand how valid this might be since I have techy people around me most often, but even when I don't, I've never heard someone complain about excess toggles. Ever. Is this a thing people do? I hear orders of magnitude more complaints about lack of toggles.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#238

Post by frandroid »

erichurkman wrote: post #217
jakebasile wrote: post #19

Reading their non-replies on Twitter feels like I'm reading something specifically designed to piss me off. Smarmy apologies, low empathy, cocksure of how correct their vision of a chat service should be. This one in particular[1]: > The goal is for workflows to evolve, but we realize change can be a bit of a pain. "Stupid peasant, we are only here to help you. Once you see the glorious vision we have you will thank…

Did their engineering team not dogfood this change? What Slack engineer or product manager tried to share a `snippet of code` with a peer and thought, "yes, that was a pleasant experience. we should ship that."

It's clearly a product manager. Let's find out what's their name.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#239

Post by gregmac »

tln wrote: post #178
gregmac wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The changing behaviour of enter/shift+enter in code block drives me absolutely crazy. Normally, shift+enter is newline, enter is send. However, inside a code block, it's the opposite. I constantly forget this and press shift+enter for a newline while in the code block and accidentally send a half-finished message. Sad to see the new WYSIWYG editor does exactly the same thing.

I'm not seeing this behavior. Are you sure you don't have a setting changed? Under Preferences > Advanced, When typing code with ```, Enter should not send the message. With this checked use ShiftEnter to send. Might be an easy fix :)

What can I say but... THANK YOU!

I definitely don't remember ever seeing or changing that setting, but it is 1000 times better with it off. Guess it's worth looking through an app's settings every once in a while, no matter how long you've been using it, just to see if there's anything new (or maybe forgotten) that would improve things for you.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#240

Post by lasagnaphil »

hazz99 wrote: post #171
ghostcluster wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This attitude to their rollout reminds me of the recent rollout of Twitter's maligned new desktop UI, the new YouTube Studio Beta, and reddit's new UI. There is almost a meme of online platform service providers not understanding their users and their workflows, and rolling out new revisions that hamper or outright remove functionality that those users rely on. I guess the canonical example would be that one Digg red…

> online platform service providers not understanding their users and their workflows In regards to the Reddit redesign, I think the people complaining that "they ignore their users" are stuck inside a bit of a bubble. I have a lot of friends who recently discovered the site, and they much prefer the redesign to the old one. I forgot where I read it, but I vaguely remember stats backing this up, or at least increase…

I really wouldn’t mind the new UI, if it weren’t this goddamn slow (it’s at the point of unusable right now). My choice of using the old UI isn’t even a choice at this point.
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