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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

#591

Post by StavrosK »

clarry wrote: post #589
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…

I also use Zulip at work. It's better than the other fancy chat applications I've tried, but still can't hold a candle to IRC.

What?! What does IRC do that Zulip doesn't? I consider the latter far superior.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#592

Post by Daedren »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #470
ako wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most people I know don’t even know WhatsApp supports Markdown.

That said, none of them are complaining because it’s a chat program. You don’t need heavy formatting in a chat program, it’s meant for short and fast messages, unlike email.

As such, I don’t believe people will spend a lot of time formatting their input in Slack, unless they really are thinking people will replace their email with Slack.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#593

Post by jsjohnst »

sambe wrote: post #495

This is not one of those "oh, that's annoying, i'll have to remember that and learn to work around it" issues. It's more like "I want to immediately stop using this software but have no choice". Its driving me crazy - Slack is all text input. Don't break text input dummy!

I’ve already put my money where my mouth is and sent an email saying I intend to cancel all future payments to Slack unless they give the option to disable it, I suggest everyone else does the same.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#594

Post by ascar »

niutech wrote: post #522
sambe wrote: post #495

This is not one of those "oh, that's annoying, i'll have to remember that and learn to work around it" issues. It's more like "I want to immediately stop using this software but have no choice". Its driving me crazy - Slack is all text input. Don't break text input dummy!

This is another argument against using proprietary SaaS solutions for such crucial purposes as business communication. There are free open source alternatives which give you full control and privacy: Mattermost, Riot.im, Rocket.chat, Let's Chat.

If you mean with "you" the operator of the tool, then yes I agree partially. But in this context it's more like "you" the user and then using open source alternatives doesn't make a big difference. Updates (which you generally want for security/good features/fixes/x) will still break your workflow regularly.

It's about how the service handles change (e.g. options to use the old interface etc.) that make the difference and not open source or proprietary.

There are many examples in FOSS that made user interfaces arguably worse and you have a hard time dealing with it, if you still need/want to run the newer version for other reasons.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#595

Post by pjc50 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #481
tnolet wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oddly most of these systems will let you specify dependencies, but not show them. Even the good old GANTT chart would let you do that. JIRA has umpteen kinds of "ticket X relates to Y" one of which is "depends on".

I think it's some sort of weird cultural impedance mismatch where the teams have sort of moved over to Kanban or Scrum or whatever, but the managing structures haven't. I used to work somewhere where managers spent a regular big chunk of time manually reconstructing GANTT from Microsoft TFS Kanban boards...

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#596

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

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…

> probably a decision made by a product team who have the data to back up their decisions

lol.. I don’t know how, but this wool has been pulled over everyones’ eyes. These “data driven” decisions are often anything but. The people making them usually don’t even have sufficient background in stats to be capable of making them. They just plug and chug in some NHST framework or A/B testing framework, making all kinds of test errors or even outright cheating since their job incentives, much like failed research incentives, requires a constant stream of new positive results that causally drive growth & engagement. Since they “have to” find these things, then anything which can be politically argued into the product will be made to “have the data to back it up” (even if it doesn’t really).

The bigger the company, the worse this effect gets.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#597

Post by gwd »

netsharc wrote: post #222
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.

Can we start calling it the WYTIWYG (What you type isn't what you get) editor...

We need to distinguish "is" and "isn't". Maybe WYTAWYG (What You Type Ain't What You Get)?

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#598

Post by jsjohnst »

pmlnr wrote: post #559
josteink wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want to immediately stop using this software but have no choice As someone who never got into slack, and never found it appealing... How so?

Because Slack killed their XMPP and IRC bridges, so the only way to connect to is via the official interface.

> so the only way to connect to is via the official interface.

Not true. There’s several alternative clients.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#599

Post by rvanmil »

ailideex wrote: post #569
chris_wot wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that Microsoft Teams is literally an existential threat, they really want to listen to feedback internally!

Microsoft Teams is pretty horrible

That's never stopped enterprise IT from rolling out tools to their users.

Teams is free as part of an Office 365 subscription (just like Sharepoint and all the other crap they bundle with it), which is what definitely makes it an existential threat to Slack, because now Slack is competing with Microsoft's very strong Office monopoly.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#600

Post by Tade0 »

bhl wrote: post #338
Tade0 wrote: post #45

As someone who used to be part of a team developing one of the most popular in-browser WYSIWYG editors: 1. Browser WYSIWYGs are really hard to make. 2. All browser WYSIWYGs are terrible. Avoid rolling your own WYSIWYG if you can. Even if you have a team of 1500 people at your disposal.

How do you feel about ProseMirror, and what browser WYSIWYG editor did you work on if you don't mind? I'm using it right now to build a personal notes editor, but there isn't much open source components to model my custom nodes to.

ProseMirror is not a "batteries included" solution, but rather a framework for creating them, so a lot of the UI stuff is missing and I wouldn't advise using it directly.

I worked on CKEditor 4 (very different from v5, which is a rewrite).

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