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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

#781

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We don't need OSS in this case, we need open protocols so anyone can use any other client, proprietary or not.

Yeah, it's worked out well for email. You can use paid services, or not. It's up to you, but they all interoperate.

They certainly DON'T interoperate. I have a mail-tester score of 100, use SPF, DKIM and DMARC, yet Microsoft still sends all my emails in the spam folder. There's nothing I can do about it, it's a black box. The only suggestion from them is that I subscribe to some paid program with another company in order to maybe, or maybe not, increase the trust in my mail server.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#782
post #492

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> 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…

That’s shocking that you have never seen this. I agree that there is a temptation to not do it, especially for smaller changes, especially if time is tight, especially if you are a smaller company, and all of that is certainly a problem. But no user testing? Not changing the design? We just recently drastically changed the design of a new product we are developing because it failed initial user testing (with clients…

> But no user testing? Not changing the design? We just recently drastically changed the design of a new product we are developing because it failed initial user testing (with clients of us who came in for user testing using a paper prototype).

your company is the exception. Most companies do no user testing. The closest i came was working at a co that did user interviews and ran some mock-ups by them before turning to eng. Once it was in our hands there was no change based on user feedback, because there was no user feedback before release. Not because we weren't willing to, but because ... they just never did.

Most folks i've spoken to do no user testing whatsoever at their companies.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#783

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All they needed was a highlight or an asterisk or something similar.

It wasn't always this way. There used to be a pencil icon next to the person/channel you had a draft in.

Right! Thanks for the reminder. I don't understand why drafts weren't just a list of links to the draft and LEAVE the original channels where I explicitly put them when I was curating my channels.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#784
post #727

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I mailed them too, and got a human response instantly. They're good at that.

Yea, having about ~2K employees for chat app company also helps in getting human response

They have closer to 4k employees, doubly explains the human response.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#785

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> IIRC there was a time when Confluence axed their markup, and inevitably a table or a template would get completely screwed, and there was nothing you could do but recreate it. TERRIBLE design. There was. I was using Confluence at the time, and it broke a lot of things. There was a wonderful filed bug at the time with a lot of angry people on it, where they promised to bring the old mechanism back as an option, and…

Atlassian Jira/Confluence SUUUUUCKS. They have given up on making anything better. I try to do as much as possible on Markdown files in a GitLab repo using Atom's Markdown preview (e.g., documentation). Gliffy diagrams are still OK.

GitLab employee here, nice to hear that GitLab is helping solve some of these workflow issues for you.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I've seen user testing with video game development; both in-house and contracted out. Whether it's useful really comes down to who is personally attached to the design in question and how much institutional power they have. I've seen games trashed in testing only to have the lead designer double down on their designs; which always goes about as well as you'd expect.

YEP.

It's amazing to see a game design fundamentally fall apart when users get a hold of the product and then see the game designers tearing their hair out. They do usually double down and call the gamers dumb or something lol.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#787
post #745
post #719

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And imo it's still basically the best design. 98 and XP were basically just flavors of win95 and those were everyone's favorite, UI wise.

I'm still using Windows 7 with the classic theme because its just such a good design.

When I couldn't figure out how to change windows 10 to look like windows 98 I installed linux with a windows98 UI and haven't been happier.

I still think Windows 3.1 was peak UI though ;)

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

We develop simulations for events and often watch how delegates interact with the UX to determine if things need amending... never called it data driven even though we do track scrolls and clicks within the software to determin user flow and pinch points.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#789
Does anyone know if this will affect the desktop client as well, or just the browser interface?

Personally I prefer the browser interface because I find the Desktop notifications and the Angry Red notification icon very distracting. But it sucks to lose markdown.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#790
post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I expressed my discontent to them as well and just received this reply: "I'm afraid there is no way to disable this at the moment, and it's not in the roadmap to roll back on this feature. That said, we're still in the initial stages here, so our focus right now is listening to feedback as we consider certain changes for improvement as we move forward. You've raised some fair points here, so I've shared your feedback…

So their rollout methodology here was to go live with beta software, on production servers, to paying customers, and force them to find the bugs. Brilliant!
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