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

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#691

Post by monkeynotes » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:35 PM 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…

Where I work we do a small amount of user testing to validate our design choices. We recently just planned out a release worth of work to improve user experience because we missed the mark with our design.

If we didn't do this we'd lose to the competition.

When I worked at EA we regularly performed user validation, we had a whole room set up for proctored user testing. Hired professionals to conduct the testing. We also invested a heap into A/B testing and had a whole team dedicated to tracking this and analytics in general. This was just for marketing/launch web sites.

I've been working in the industry for 20 years and while the norm is as you describe there are certainly plenty of exceptions, especially when you product lives and dies by UX.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#692

Post by shaan7 » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:36 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #663

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! I didn't know about Ripcord, and so far it is great. I am amazed how fast it is. I'm also depressed that this amazes me, as it basically does what mIRC did for me over a decade ago. This is developed in QT by one person, and it looks pretty feature-complete to me. I really don't understand why a company the size of Slack invests all their development effort into such a subpar platform as Electron, when a n…

I really don't understand why a company the size of Slack invests all their development effort into such a subpar platform as Electron, when a native solution is clearly doable with very limited resources. Several things I can think of: "quantity is not quality"; JS developers far outnumber everyone; making web apps look exactly the way they want is easy, and they are not interested in platform-native functionality,…

> making web apps look exactly the way they want is easy

Its easy peasy with Qt as well. I am the only dev for https://www.sostronk.com/app and it looks (and behaves) _exactly_ as our designer wants it to. (Oh, and this is when I'm also spending time working on backend stories).

> no one cares about efficiency anymore.

That is not true. Discord and friends spend a lot of time for efficiency because they're using Electron. It is not impossible to have a (relatively) efficient application with Electron (VSCode for example), it just takes more effort. Compare that with Qt where performance is free of cost - in the last 5 years at SoStronk, I've hardly ever needed to spend dedicated effort for improving performance. Another example, and I wasn't aware of this till very recently, is the Telegram Desktop app which is Qt as well.

But yeah, I do agree with your first point, the only reason Electron is in use is because JS developers are a plenty. At the end, cost is the #1 thing when businesses make decisions.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#693

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:37 PM UTC

infinitezest wrote: post #676

TeMPOraL wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Personally, I recommend switching to Ripcord as a Slack client. That's what I did some time ago, and I couldn't be happier.

I seem to remember reports of people having their accounts suspended for using third-party clients (though I may be thinking of Discord accounts). Either way, I've used ripcord a bit and though it's not much to look at, it certainly gets the job done. I'm personally grateful for an alternative.

WRT. Ripcord, from what I've heard (I can't find the source now :/), it was Discord, the bans were due to a bug, and were promptly lifted after contact with support. But perhaps there were other bans I haven't heard of.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#694

Post by aivosha » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:37 PM UTC

It's fascinating to see how tools turn into environment people wanna live in. Its a god damn tool, dont commit your lives to it. Use it, abuse it, it doesnt work - toss it.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#695

Post by liveoneggs » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:38 PM UTC

ck425 wrote: post #500

izietto wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This. Power users (normally engineers) drove Slack usage at my last company. I'm now in an org that uses Teams and all the engineers want to use Slack. Likely won't happen but it's important to note that this feature isn't just annoying a small segment of users, it's annoying the small segment that are most vocal about adopting Slack. And who due to economic power arguably have more influence.

"engineers" drove your company to spend money on a chat tool from a company that had leaked private chats, gave no real control over the interface, and used a closed protocol? Now those same people are complaining about it?

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#696

Post by liveoneggs » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:38 PM UTC

why is it multiple lines tall?!!!

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#697

Post by devit » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:45 PM UTC

Seems like these guys need to learn the concept of consent, i.e. that if you try to force someone to do something they don't want, they aren't going to stick around with you.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#698

Post by ncmncm » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:46 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #183

ncmncm wrote: post #148

Slack's everything is terrible. At MongoDB, we were supposed to be on it at all times. It was a continuous source of stress and broken concentration. It is what I left behind most eagerly. Curiously, Google Chat has not become similarly stress-inducing. Yet. Gmail has become moreso lately, though. At least once a week it manages to conceal an important message. Since Google Chat works, I expect them to drop it soon.

Google Chat is quite stress-inducing for me as well. Maybe I don't know how to use it properly, but when I get a notification it is so hard for me to find the message that triggered it. Our Google Chat has a lot of messages, so sometimes I could have to scroll through hundreds of messages and thread to find it. It's not highlighted or anything to make it easy, either. Because I often can't find the message that pinge…

At my office, we have mostly only individual chats, plus a customer-crisis chat ("Who's helping XYZ?" "On it"). So if there is any activity, it is relevant, and it actually reduces interruptions, because when we're deep in something, we don't look, and somebody with a question doesn't need to hang about waiting.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#699

Post by indosauros » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:48 PM UTC

rerx wrote: post #543

pbreit wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your asterisk example works OK for me. As does the blog writer's "when you do `foo()` it foos the bar".

I could not reproduce the example issues from the blog post, but the dual asterices inside the back ticks still fail for me. The upside is that it's now possible to have bold passages in monospaced text. I missed that before.

Here's a gif of the second issue from the blog post, just reproduced on my client

https://i.imgur.com/X8FZJhi.gif

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#700

Post by SubuSS » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:49 PM UTC

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.

We shouldn't fetishize control as much.

In >15 years what I have seen is that OSS comes with a huge cost of attention - that you'd be better off focusing on your business need.

Running most of these OSS even at a medium employee count scale is a full-team-commit-nightmare. It essentially means your it department now needs a specialist who will be able to handle your org quirks, remember the tweaks and keep baby sitting it. Not to mention many OSS teams (I don't know about the above listed) are ever so sneakily introducing enterprise clauses about usage in their EULA.

I don't want to name names, but even with paid software we are seeing this problem everywhere in trying to host: But at least here, we got the actual developers and experts on a call who can walk us through why x employees are fine and x+1 nukes their system.