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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

#971

Post by robert_tweed »

jsjohnst wrote: post #933
sean0- wrote: post #901

Supposedly this feature is being walked back now. I just received the following from their support. I'm ecstatic to hear this and hope their Product Management has reassessed the importance of non-WYSIWYG inputs. >>> We really appreciate your feedback, and we hear your frustration. We're sorry for the impact this is having on your ability to communicate with your team and on your overall productivity. We made a mista…

Funny how different the response I got from them yesterday versus what you got today. “Not in our roadmap to have an option to go back” is rather dramatically different. Power of outcry I guess, I’ll take it!

I wonder if this article being on the front page of HN for so long had a direct impact?

To put the scale of the outrage into context, this is one of the most upvoted articles since the MacOS High Sierra "log in as root by typing no password" bug.

That one got a total of 3000 points. At the time of this comment, this is still on the front page with over 2.6k and counting. It's already surpassed the news of Julian Assange's arrest, which fell slightly short of 2.4k.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#972

Post by lytefm »

nnq wrote: post #952
arrrg wrote: post #945

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you come to the conclusion that WYSIWYG are “one of the most despised features in the UX world”? That seems completely unfounded to me. WYSIWYG editors can be extremely bad … but millions of people use WYSIWYG editors all the time and wouldn’t ever think of exchanging them for plaintext editors with Markdown or something like that. You comment seems completely disconnected from any semblance of reality.

...problem is combining WYSIWIG with Markdown: that can't ever work well, you need a small toggle to let users choose toggle/choose between WYSIWIG (default) and Markdown, and have it remember the last setting the user used. Best for new users and advanced ones. If you have BOTH in one editor it's like you've built some kind of Vim-like UI that randomly jumps between modes, it will confuse the shit out of everybody a…

I don't agree that a WYSIWIG Markdown editor can't ever work well. I've been using Typora and MarkText a lot over the last year and usually only had to revert to the plain text view when doing larger formatting changes in enumerations/lists. Writing seems much more productive and less distracted that with a split view or plain Markdown/ LaTeX.

That being said, also Microsoft Teams is pretty awful when it comes to `code highlighting`. I haven't exactly figured out why it sometimes renders and sometimes not, it usually works when appending the ` to a letter and then pressing space, but not in other cases.

Just because BigCorps fail to deliver a good solution and then shove it down the user's throat anyway, it's not a bad idea per se. I'd love to have Google Docs & Slides with WYSIWIG Markdown.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#973

Post by lytefm »

jordache wrote: post #868
ailideex wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Teams is pretty horrible

MS Teams is free. At a previous company, we had slack and MS Teams side by side, to trial out MS Teams. Everyone preferred Slack by a huge margin. We were told to get use to Teams, because Teams is free. Guess what, it was fine.. no notable productivity lose going from slack to teams. If anything, team's sharepoint file integration is much better than slack, for keeping a single source of truth.

Same here. Yes, it's buggy and annoyingly messing up the formatting of messages, especially when trying to use WYSIWIG Markdown. Since we're running on Office365 due to Management preferences, we started using Teams. With Franz, it's usabale on Linux. It's bad compared to Slack ofc, but not so much worse that it would justify an additional 11,75€ per user and month.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#974

Post by wpietri »

hanspeter wrote: post #437
wpietri wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. Why stay at a place that doesn't value your ability to think? Or, worse, doesn't value the thoughts of anybody below a certain rank? Not only is that a miserable experience, but I think it's also a recipe for a product that only gets worse.

> Why stay at a place that doesn't value your ability to think? Or, worse, doesn't value the thoughts of anybody below a certain rank? That's the over reaction part. The fact that two engineers feels uncomfortable expressing their feelings, says very little about the culture or values in their company. It could be that they are just too introverted or insecure to speak up about most things, or that they have a good r…

If the original commenter had said, "if any two engineers feel uncomfortable, you should definitely quit right away", then you'd be right.

But that's not what was said. It was correctly described as a possible management problem, a signal. If your notion is that one should leave at the first signal, that's something you bring to it.

Anyhow, we have evidence that the problem is more widespread. It's obvious from the HN reaction that quite a lot of people hate this feature, engineers especially. But still it was released. If you want to hypothesize a situation that makes that unimportant, you have to dream up a lot more than two extremely insecure engineers.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#975

Post by savingGrace »

After reading this post, I don't really know what this new feature is. I'm part of the 'enterprise' crowd and we tend to lag behind in 'features'. I do know about Slack's 'deal with it' attitude, though.

When the new 'draft' feature came out I desperately wanted to turn it off(I really hate it). I opened a support ticket and spoke with one of their team members. I basically got an "It's what our customers want" kind of reply. I am the customer. Why can I not disable/enable it in an options menu somewhere?

This post says it all: 'If you prefer the old interface… well, screw you, says Slack. ... I wish Slack would provide a way to disable the WYSIWYG rich-text-input box. I don’t think it’s useful, and it’s extremely annoying...'

I miss IRC.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#976

Post by barrkel »

rvnx wrote: post #959
Aeolun wrote: post #948

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because millions of people use WYSIWYG editors every day, does not mean that they don’t absolutely despise it. I haven’t ever heard anyone comment on how enjoyable Word is to use.

We've started working on a preference that will let you return to the previous message composer. We don't have a specific release date to share right now — it's this team's top and only priority, however, and we expect to have it available on the desktop within a couple of weeks === "team's top and only priority" I guess they need to learn how to be efficient if they need several weeks to add a checkbox to change one…

Product plan; UI design mock up; technical implementation plan; task breakdown; implementation; code review; QA; build and release.

The larger a product is, and the more people involved, the more steps and phases are needed to keep everything running smoothly. A dev shop with fewer people can be more efficient because there's less communication overhead, individuals wear more hats. But it doesn't scale.

It's also an artifact of Agile, SCRUM especially. If you keep a fungible pool of devs who can be redirected on a weekly basis, they don't necessarily have knowledge or expertise in the area of code they're working on, so there needs to be extra investigation time, sync on technical details, and more QA to cover omissions and unwanted interactions from lack of total knowledge. Component ownership is less susceptible to this but you lose some agility as dev fungibility is reduced.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#978

Post by tripzilch »

Fiahil wrote: post #675
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.

It's genuinely hard to make a good design for something, but if you put the time and effort required, that's the difference between Atom and VS Code. The only way I know how to make a good design, is to have a good Product Owner. Prototyping helps a little bit, User testing absolutely not. You can have five different PO working on the same epic and still get a bad design, but it only takes one to find the perfect sol…

Huh, why do you believe user testing is unhelpful to make a good UX design?

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#979

Post by lilfatbitch »

it33 wrote: post #891

Mattermost CEO here. In my mind Slack’s target persona is no longer an engineer (if it ever was) - It is more likely a less tech savvy person who wants a WYSIWYG editor for rich text inputs. For what it’s worth, Mattermost is an open source alternative built for engineers by engineers. The interface is markdown.

yeah but do you have a weechat plugin?

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#980

Post by capableweb »

sean0- wrote: post #901

Supposedly this feature is being walked back now. I just received the following from their support. I'm ecstatic to hear this and hope their Product Management has reassessed the importance of non-WYSIWYG inputs. >>> We really appreciate your feedback, and we hear your frustration. We're sorry for the impact this is having on your ability to communicate with your team and on your overall productivity. We made a mista…

> it's this team's top and only priority, however, and we expect to have it available on the desktop within a couple of weeks, with Android following shortly thereafter

Does this seem unreasonably long? I get that large corps have longer development time, but wouldn't this be behind a internal feature toggle anyways? How do they deploy versions really? Did they already ripped out the code and are unable to go back? They need to rewrite the functionality or something like that?

Probably only someone with insight into this specific problem can answer but would be interesting to hear about it...

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