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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

#351

Post by nitrogen »

gkoberger wrote: post #182
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…

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…

At least for some of us with strong spatial orientation, search is not a substitute for spatial navigation and muscle memory.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#353

Post by kelseydh »

bartread wrote: post #339
tbabb wrote: post #111

This reminds me of Atlassian's god-awful WYSIWYG editor. In both cases, I get that some users can't or don't like to use a machine grammar/markup, however simple. For some people markup is bad UX. Give them a WYSIWYG; that's fine. But don't remove the markup editor if your WYSIWYG editor is anything but a perfect one-two-one replacement for markup (and I have never seen one that satisfies that). IIRC there was a time…

> This reminds me of Atlassian's god-awful WYSIWYG editor. Oh my goodness: triggered. I've barred the use of Confluence at our company specifically because of this. "But, but, we used it at blah company." "Yes, so did I at blahblah company, and it was unbelievably crappy and made me angry every time I had to edit a document: we're not using it." I DO NOT want to have to use what amounts to an extremely buggy, caprici…

Yeah, the very first time I used Confluence I was in shock of how developer's at one time could have thought this was a good or useful product for discussing/planning code changes.

For ticketing software, I find Clubhouse to be much better than JIRA. Normal markdown that doesn't drive you insane. Much slicker all around.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#354

Post by climb_stealth »

hunter2_ wrote: post #237
_bxg1 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd say one problem is that toggles make your code more complicated and harder to test. And the more toggles there are the more combinations for potential issues to pop up.

As a user I'd prefer to see more toggles, but if I had to maintain a product I'd probably try to make good decisions instead of leaving things open.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#355

Post by kelseydh »

igetspam wrote: post #327
jhomedall wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're currently trying to force this into pull requests in Bitbucket. Right now you can revert to the old-style pull requests with Markdown support, but that is going to go away once the new system is out of beta. I really regret going with Atlassian here; I would have advised against it if I knew about this. I will definitely advise against it in the future.

This is why I heavily advocate for not using Atlassian products. I use the "can't trust Australia" statement as a supporting argument but the terrible editor is what started my crusade. My company uses Jira but I do all my tracking in Clubhouse. We have Confluence but most of us write docs in Google Docs because it's less painful. I recently got us moving away from Bitbucket too. If Slack stands by this change (like…

100% agree that Clubhouse > JIRA. If I hear a company uses JIRA, I will actually question whether I want to work there.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#356

Post by carlivar »

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #329
vailripper wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like Atlassians approach with Jira - "it supports markdown, except when it doesn't!"

I _so badly_ want Jira and Confluence to support just plain old markdown. Their editor is a nightmare; every programmer where I work hates it but all of management seems to love it.

Confluence used to have it. Or a similar syntax at least. They went WYSIWYG around 2010 or so. It was a dark day; I still remember the plaintive cries echoing from engineer cubes (we had whole cubes back then!).

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#357

Post by kelseydh »

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…

That import chats from Slack feature is compelling, damn.

So Zulip doesn't hide chats over a certain amount like Slack does eh? This could make it extremely useful for cash strapped non-profits.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#358

Post by kelseydh »

goostavos wrote: post #281
ajkjk wrote: post #47

The funny thing is that I am sure most of the people who work at slack know it's terrible, but no one asks them. There is a small cohort of product managers who probably have a plausible-sounding reason to do it, and they need to do something to justify their jobs, so they alienate everybody else because no one stops them. I am, to put it lightly, familiar with this in other companies.

I bet a large percentage of Slack people _tried super hard_ to stop that cohort of PMs. However, you can only fight upwards so much before you just check out completely, cash the checks, and halfheartedly build whatever nonsense they're forcing through.

It's common for ambitious employees in not-so-ambitious tech companies to lose their jobs over not realizing that the optimal strategy for keeping their job is to just do their work as told, collect a pay cheque, and not innovate.

In these companies, the fastest way to get canned is to believe you are there to help the company succeed by trying to innovate, and in the process of doing so, imply there are flaws with how it's currently being done.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#360

Post by kelseydh »

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…

If we embraced this philosophy none of us would be typing quickly on touch screen phones. Steve Jobs knew it beat a physical keyboard, and when pressed by people who complained about the new iPhone's touchscreen keyboard, he grinned and said "You'll get used to it." And oh boy, did they ever.
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