Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible • Hacker News Board

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#481

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:28 AM UTC

tnolet wrote: post #419

kelseydh wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Was super skeptical about all those Jira replacement SaaS’s out there. But Clubhouse is actually pretty good. For people on the fence, give it a try.

I for one am still waiting for usable task management SaaS - one that doesn't limit me to "epic/project/task" split, but instead recognizes that the work is being decomposed recursively, and has dependencies.

All I really want is a system that lets me arrange my tasks into a DAG. B is a subtask of A. C and D are subtasks or B. E is a subtask of D. F is a subtask of A, but depends on D being complete. It's simple and matches how people think about work. Add a capability for estimation (for the love of $deity, in durations, not dates!), and you can pull a critical path diagram straight out of it.

Is it so hard to make software like this? Why nobody does? And how come that some project management packages (like JIRA, AFAIR) explicitly mention subtasks as non-features, because they're not "agile enough". The only piece of PM software I've seen that's even capable of what I want is YouTrack by JetBrains, but even there, the graph nature of tasks is only an afterthought; the product tries very hard to look like Jira, with all its bad features.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#482

Post by b3kart » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:30 AM UTC

bradstewart wrote: post #118

njharman wrote: post #83

I've found "developers", people who work extensively with plain text and mark up languages, mostly hate WYSIWYG. Because it just gets in the way of / works differently than the skills/knowledge they already have. I presume people who primarily work in Word/OpenOffice/Whatever Apples thing is, feel the opposite. If your customers include both, UI is basically impossible to get right for everyone.

Why wouldn't they make this optional? Then everybody gets we they want.

Exactly. How hard can that be. It’s almost like they’re on a mission to piss off their technical users.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#483

Post by MatekCopatek » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:32 AM UTC

l-p wrote: post #467

There is a way to disable it via a bookmarklet: https://github.com/kfahy/slack-disable-wysiwyg-bookmarklet

Awesome, but looks like this relies on disabling A/B testing, so it will die once they fully roll it out :(

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#484

Post by ansgri » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:32 AM UTC

benhurmarcel wrote: post #450

kelseydh wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can you recommend a replacement for Jira that can be self-hosted? Many companies cannot store their data on a third-party server.

There's at least Redmine. Uses Textile by default, but there were plugins for Markdown.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#485

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:34 AM UTC

greggman2 wrote: post #474

Plyphon_ wrote: post #464

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…

> they quite likely have done lots of user testing that has shown clear desirability, improved value to user, improved usability I have never worked at a company that did user testing or if they did it was always done in a way or interpreted in a way to back up the designer's opinion. I don't think I've once in my entire 40 yr career seen a designer test with users, find out something was bad, and change their design…

Me neither. I am currently of the belief that most of that "data driven" product development is just bullshit, and not really even data driven. It's too easy to just plug Google Analytics and proclaim you're "data driven". And if all you do is telemetry and A/B tests, it's way too easy to make them favor whatever you want them to favor, either purposefully or accidentally.

I haven't seen much evidence that would say otherwise, but there's plenty of circumstantial evidence favoring my belief. Like this case.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#486

Post by izietto » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:34 AM UTC

Plyphon_ wrote: post #464

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…

IMHO they missed the fact that power users would have preferred the old behavior and didn't provide the opportunity to switch between the two behaviors

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#487

Post by huckyaus » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:35 AM UTC

Roark66 wrote: post #472

aero142 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would bet a lot of money I already know the pitch. It's the same one that the Confluence PM I'm sure made. "We have done very well selling to technical programmers and hip startups, but the market is so much bigger. shows Office 365 revenue numbers vs Slack revenue numbers . We have an opportunity to take this to the next level. We need to make this the goto office communication platform. cheers . Markdown may seem…

>I would bet a lot of money I already know the pitch. It's the same one that the Confluence PM I'm sure made. "We have done very well selling to technical programmers and hip startups, but the market is so much bigger. shows Office 365 revenue numbers vs Slack revenue numbers. We have an opportunity to take this to the next level. We need to make this the goto office communication platform. cheers. You're probably ri…

>MS has competing software (Skype for business previously known as Lync)

Teams, not Skype for Business, is Microsoft's Slack competitor.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#488

Post by Erlich_Bachman » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:36 AM UTC

_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.

*Slack, not signal.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#489

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:38 AM UTC

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…

My memory is fuzzy a bit, but I think I saw Slack being called, or even calling itself, the "e-mail killer". This leads me to believe that the hybridization you mention is on purpose, and its goal is to make profit by destroying the only remaining decentralized communication protocol in widespread use.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#490

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:41 AM UTC

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…

[deleted]