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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

#271

Post by aprdm »

Kalium wrote: post #205
ben_jones wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is a punch to the gut for me, I've been developing an internal CRM for two years that embodies many of the philosophies you describe. But while it is somewhat depressing, I'm left with questions about how bad it really is. First, is it possible to develop software without inconveniencing business users with temporary (let's assume the ultimate products are better then the linux/vim/emacs they are superse…

> Would we still have Twitter? Reddit? Steam? Whatsapp? How many of those broke old workflows to introduce new ones with no clear benefits? But that's not the point. We're not talking here about broad services like Reddit, Twitter, or Steam. We're talking about something more akin to a libary. You shouldn't break interfaces in a library without a strong, compelling reason. Do things need to change eventually? Absolut…

That's a place where the benefits of open source and hosting your own stuff pay off.

I can stay in older functional versions for a long time without being forced to upgrade and disrupt everyone's workflow because someone in a company thought they knew better how we should work.

Jenkins, Gitlab, rocketchat, review board all open source tools that you can be running years old ( on an isolated network please ) without upgrading and being very functional...

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#272

Post by city41 »

chx wrote: post #114

The exact same happened with the draft feature. The importance of habit forming UI is very well documented, going back at least as far as Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface and the draft feature completely breaks it -- if you as much as accidentally leave a character in there, you can't find the channel/DM at its normal place. Despite repeated calls to make it optional, nothing. Threads are also broken, has always bee…

The draft feature positively boggles my mind. The intention seems to be to collect all your drafts into one location. But that comes with the assumption people will have multiple drafts for ... chat channels? Do people really work that way?

If the actual intention is to remind you you have a half written message, seems some kind of indicator on the channel would suffice. Having my channel “disappear” on me is maddening.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#274

Post by xixixao »

These bugs are typical of wysiwyg implementations. The only true, great, wysiwyg (but not really) editor is Bear, which is actually mostly markdown, but done in a way that lay person could use it without ever remembering any markdown. It’s simply delightful (and works on the phone!!)

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#275

Post by baby »

_jal wrote: post #117
guessmyname wrote: post #46

This is funny because I work across the street of Slack’s office in Vancouver, Canada and two Slack engineers who I frequently chat with during our daily commute already told me they —and a handful of other employees— hate the WYSIWYG input box too, but were afraid to express their feelings because their role is irrelevant compared to the people who made the decision to ship it.

Bad sign. If the rank and file are afraid to give honest internal feedback, they have a management problem. At least for me, that's a time-to-leave signal.

And this ladies and gentlemen is the over reaction of the year!

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#276

Post by tasogare »

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…

It can’t be for people on mobile: the UI is buggy (especially back and forth navigation) and constantly nagging to download the native app. That’s super annoying.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#277

Post by paulddraper »

guessmyname wrote: post #46

This is funny because I work across the street of Slack’s office in Vancouver, Canada and two Slack engineers who I frequently chat with during our daily commute already told me they —and a handful of other employees— hate the WYSIWYG input box too, but were afraid to express their feelings because their role is irrelevant compared to the people who made the decision to ship it.

For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to create two adjacent but separate code blocks.

    ```
    one
    ```
    ```
    two
    ```
I've tried and tried.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#278

Post by strictnein »

rdhatt wrote: post #48

You can submit feedback to Slack using "/feedback" command. The nice thing it appears they have real people give you real replies. I encourage people to use it. I asked them for the option to turn it off. An excerpt from their response. > ... we understand that this has caused a disruption in workflows for some of our more technical users. While we don't have any active plans to make this configurable at the moment,…

That's a pretty amusing quote:

> 'While we don't have any active plans to make this configurable at the moment, we are in the process of collecting user feedback so that we can find a way to make it work for everyone.'

It's like the answer to the second half is in the first half of their statement.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#279

Post by pushcx »

StavrosK wrote: post #39

At the risk of sounding like a shill, I'd like to shill Zulip. We started using it instead of Slack, and it has been amazing . It's fast, everything is designed to help you get to conversations quickly, keyboard accessibility is second to none and the streams is a much better default than rooms. I can't recommend it enough, it's well worth the money even though they have a nice free tier and are OSS so you can self-h…

Keyboard accessibility is second to Weechat. Weechat responds instantly to all keypresses and never leaves janky UI on the screen.

When reading Zulip threads I frequently mute those I'm not interested in. To do so, you have to hit 'i' to open a menu, then 'M' (there is no shortcut on 'm'), then a popup message slowly animates in saying the thread is muted. If you hit 'n' to go to the next thread, the popup message doesn't clear, so it's covering the top message of the new thread, and the popup menu is still open covering the top 1-3 messages, still listing the last thread's title. So leaving a single thread I know I'm emphatically not interested in takes five seconds. There's a nasty positive feedback loop: catching up on threads is slow and frustrating, so I leave it longer, so there's more threads that take even more time and frustration, repeat.

I reported this buggy workflow ~2 years ago and it's why I've repeatedly given up on a very interesting community's Zulip chat. There's plenty more flaky stuff, like switching messages with j/k sometimes not scrolling the screen, or long messages where you have to take your hand off the home row to scroll up and down because if you hit space the floating nav covers lines you haven't seen, long messages being "closed" so you have to navigate to each individually to read, no keys are customizable, death by a thousand cuts. I have my fingers crossed for a bitlbee integration.

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