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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

#461

Post by greggman2 »

new_here wrote: post #396
ss3000 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious if you've explored something based on ProseMirror? I've heard good things about it and it seems to have a decent implementation for hybrid WYSIWYG + Markdown. https://prosemirror.net/examples/markdown/

We used ProseMirror to build our editor at https://able.bio/new We chose ProseMirror after doing a lot of research (TinyMCE, Slate, Draft, Medium toolbar) and have been very happy with what it’s enabled us to do so far. We’ll probably write a blog post about it at some point.

ProseMirror has many of the problems the linked article described.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#462

Post by Doxin »

city41 wrote: post #272
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 maddeni…

I can't imagine anyone who has a job that doesn't consist mostly of talking to people doing that. But people with manager or sales-type jobs? I bet they could really love this feature. Start typing your message, discover you're missing info, task someone with finding that info. get back to the message whenever.

Still though, making it break the sort should really be a setting. Or even better, just show people twice if there's a draft open. Once in their normal place and once under the draft header.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#463

Post by tekkk »

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…

Fun fact: the editor is open-source (I think this is the same) https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlaskit-mk-2/src/master/pac...

As I have been fiddling with ProseMirror I've found out that their editor is the most extensive PM-based editor out there.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#464

Post by Plyphon_ »

In their defence (not the defence of the WYSIWYG box itself) - they quite likely have done lots of user testing that has shown clear desirability, improved value to user, improved usability, etc etc.

You have to remember Slack's target persona is probably no longer the Engineer (If it ever was) - it's more likely a much less tech-savvy employee who finds WYSIWYG editors very handy to create rich text inputs.

I guess my point is - I'd wager this wasn't "rail roaded" through by some senior stakeholder that no-one can speak up too, but was probably a decision made by a product team who have the data to back up their decisions.

Now if the above isn't true (and perhaps the opposite is true) - then agreed, those are the signs it's time to leave.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#465

Post by manmal »

livueta wrote: post #50

Specific bug gripes aside: I see this editor as emblematic of Slack's broader shift away from what I think it should be (primarily synchronous chat; irc with a friendlier ui and integrated bouncer features) towards what many people seem to want to use it as (async-heavy pseudo-replacement for email where I get to sit and watch the "...is typing" indicator flicker while somebody writes an essay at me). My rule of thum…

The solution is to view Slack messages as completely async, too. If you chat with someone in a different location, you don't know how long they will have time to converse. Maybe they are using Slack on the phone and just replied once to give you quick feedback; but cannot be pulled into a longer conversation.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#466

Post by TeMPOraL »

rurounijones wrote: post #195
FridgeSeal wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s that stand for? I’m guessing something along the lines of: High Importance Person Pushing Own (desires??)?

As others have said it means "Highest Paid Person's Opinion" but as a little extra. It is usually used when a company has no actual data to work on and therefore goes with the "obvious" as defined by "the boss" (Hippo). Not that it is necessarily true. There could be lots of data that some people are not aware of and that only senior people are privy to, but if that is not shared with the team developing the software…

Nah, HIPPO works perfectly well in "data-driven" companies: the highest paid person proclaims what the data is supposed to tell, and then lots of data "science" happens to make the data show exactly that.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#468

Post by misnome »

snowe2010 wrote: post #364
snowe2010 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21590153

Really unsure why I was downvoted for this. I posted a link to someone else in this thread that has actually talked to Slack employees, it's directly related to the comment I replied to.

Probably for the same reason people downvote when the same comment is copy-pasted all over a thread; I don't need to be linked to somewhere else in the same conversation. I especially don't need to be linked to somewhere else in the conversation that _I have already read because it is higher ranked_. Also possibly: following an opaquish link to find yourself on the very same page is annoying, and kind of the opposite of insightful, which you might be hoping for.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#469

Post by Doxin »

igetspam wrote: post #318
timcederman wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you hit ctrl/cmd-z after it automatically changes something you can keep going like you used to. e.g. try typing `foo`, and then hit ctrl-z, it'll revert it to plain text. I've found that useful for getting around the autoformatting.

That's ridiculous, right?. Cmd/Ctrl-z has a defined function. Slack is hijacking that because they've decided that decades of established patterns are wrong and creating another one-off for their very specific use case is the right thing to do. The hubris...

It's not really that radical of a thing to do though. Word has the same sort of behaviour except utilising backspace. If you type " - " in word it creates a bulleted list, hit backspace once and you get the literal text you entered.

I'm not entirely sure which is the less-worse option here but at least it's not a wildly new concept, just a different button.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#470

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

ako wrote: post #405
StefanKarpinski wrote: post #288

Slack’s old formatting syntax was Markdown-like but not exactly Markdown, just similar. In case anyone from Slack is paying attention to their technical users here, this is a great opportunity to move to CommonMark formatting for technical users and wysiwyg for non-technical users: just make this optional and switch the format syntax for the non-wysiwyg mode to CommonMark. I can understand that changing the formattin…

Slack probably has statistics which indicate that by now their largest user group is non-techies. And i'm assuming that if you look at paying customers, the amount of non-technies is probably even larger. People who are probably not even aware of this thing called markdown. So if you need to increase revenue replacing markdown with wysiwyg will make sense to UX and product management.

Excel is the tool used most widely by paying customer non-techies.

Excel also happens to be the software with the most arcane UI on Earth.

'Making sense' is not the issue here, motivation is.

And I don't think removing a power-user feature and replacing it with something half-baked will motivate your user base.

P.S. WhatsApp uses a markdown-like UI for formatting: https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/android/26000002/

Somehow, its non-techie users aren't complaining.

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