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Fair enough. How's this: If the UI of a desktop application does not match the standard appearance and interface of the rest of the operating system, a bad UX i

Fair enough. How's this: If the UI of a desktop application does not match the standard appearance and interface of the rest of the operating system, a bad UX is almost a certainty, in my experience.

tptacek 11y ago
If I want to share a diagram with Patrick on our internal Slack --- which we set up in under 10 minutes --- I select the diagram on my desktop and drag it into the window for the Slack channel. Everyone on that channel sees the diagram immediately. I do not give a shit what Slack's buttons look like. I can't do that with IRC. Even if we're all standardized on a modern OSX IRC client, we're still going to end up "sharing" URLs.
- Albright 11y ago
  Again, you can use HipChat and get something closer to the best of both worlds; drag-and-drop file sharing with a standard (well… more standard-ish) OS X interface. It's great for you that look-and-feel isn't so important to you, but it is to a lot of people, and that includes myself. At any rate, on Slack, I once drag-and-dropped a text file with the output of a shell script that a colleague wanted to see. He started telling me how it was strange that the output seemed to cut off right in the middle of a line. lol, just kidding, Slack was just cutting it off like that, since Slack apparently can't show more than the first few K of a text file for some reason SO WHY IS IT SHOWING IT AT ALL ARGH
  - tptacek 11y ago
    I'm sure Slack isn't the best available tool; I just know it's better than IRC.
    - dvanduzer 11y ago
      For every kind of team sysops work I've ever done, I would say that Slack is indeed the best available tool. Not every organization needs this kind of workflow though, so the best available tool depends on what your organization has to integrate. (Disclosure: I've never tried HipChat.)
- comex 11y ago
  Just in case you don't know, several modern IRC clients will automatically fetch links posted in the channel and, if they are images (or even things like YouTube videos), display them inline. I don't know if any of them support automatically converting pasted images to links, though; it sounds sinple enough that I wouldn't be surprised if at least one did. Of course, what you mentioned is only one of many things that Just Work in Slack and are at best a pain on IRC, but still.
- vacri 11y ago
  Not all criticisms of Slack are "Use IRC instead!". Albright suggested HipChat as a better example. I do care what Slack looks like though - the chat window has so much wasted whitespace that it doesn't show a lot of comms; add in a space-guzzling integration or two and it gets really hard to follow a conversation. Hipchat uses space a lot more efficiently.
jahewson 11y ago
I disagree. Microsoft Office hasn't looked like the rest of Windows for years. iTunes looks unlike any other OS X app. Photoshop has never used native UI. Non-native UI can be done very well as long as it's not entirely foreign, or an uncanny emulation of almost-native.
- Albright 11y ago
  How odd that you used three applications with widely despised UIs as your examples.
hatsix 11y ago
How about this: A very strongly worded statement with a huge assumption stating almost certainty, with a small caveat of 'in my experience' allowing me to refute anyone who might spend time listing out all of the examples of how this is wrong. In MY experience, it is Certainly good UX to not have to learn multiple ways of doing things, one for the in-browser experience, and one for the desktop experience.
brenschluss 11y ago
You're saying: the efficacy of a UX can be predicted entirely by the UI's adherence to other UI. Which is also an erroneous statement. I use vi(m) on OSX. vi's UI "does not match the standard appearance and interface of the rest of the operating system." Thus, I predict that VI has a horrible UX. However, I am incorrect. Why is this so?

Fair enough. How's this: If the UI of a desktop application does not match the standard appearance and interface of the rest of the operating system, a bad UX is almost a certainty, in my experience.

tptacek 11y ago

If I want to share a diagram with Patrick on our internal Slack --- which we set up in under 10 minutes --- I select the diagram on my desktop and drag it into the window for the Slack channel. Everyone on that channel sees the diagram immediately. I do not give a shit what Slack's buttons look like. I can't do that with IRC. Even if we're all standardized on a modern OSX IRC client, we're still going to end up "sharing" URLs.

Albright 11y ago
Again, you can use HipChat and get something closer to the best of both worlds; drag-and-drop file sharing with a standard (well… more standard-ish) OS X interface. It's great for you that look-and-feel isn't so important to you, but it is to a lot of people, and that includes myself. At any rate, on Slack, I once drag-and-dropped a text file with the output of a shell script that a colleague wanted to see. He started telling me how it was strange that the output seemed to cut off right in the middle of a line. lol, just kidding, Slack was just cutting it off like that, since Slack apparently can't show more than the first few K of a text file for some reason SO WHY IS IT SHOWING IT AT ALL ARGH
- tptacek 11y ago
  I'm sure Slack isn't the best available tool; I just know it's better than IRC.
  - dvanduzer 11y ago
    For every kind of team sysops work I've ever done, I would say that Slack is indeed the best available tool. Not every organization needs this kind of workflow though, so the best available tool depends on what your organization has to integrate. (Disclosure: I've never tried HipChat.)
comex 11y ago
Just in case you don't know, several modern IRC clients will automatically fetch links posted in the channel and, if they are images (or even things like YouTube videos), display them inline. I don't know if any of them support automatically converting pasted images to links, though; it sounds sinple enough that I wouldn't be surprised if at least one did. Of course, what you mentioned is only one of many things that Just Work in Slack and are at best a pain on IRC, but still.
vacri 11y ago
Not all criticisms of Slack are "Use IRC instead!". Albright suggested HipChat as a better example. I do care what Slack looks like though - the chat window has so much wasted whitespace that it doesn't show a lot of comms; add in a space-guzzling integration or two and it gets really hard to follow a conversation. Hipchat uses space a lot more efficiently.

jahewson 11y ago

I disagree. Microsoft Office hasn't looked like the rest of Windows for years. iTunes looks unlike any other OS X app. Photoshop has never used native UI. Non-native UI can be done very well as long as it's not entirely foreign, or an uncanny emulation of almost-native.

Albright 11y ago
How odd that you used three applications with widely despised UIs as your examples.

hatsix 11y ago

How about this: A very strongly worded statement with a huge assumption stating almost certainty, with a small caveat of 'in my experience' allowing me to refute anyone who might spend time listing out all of the examples of how this is wrong. In MY experience, it is Certainly good UX to not have to learn multiple ways of doing things, one for the in-browser experience, and one for the desktop experience.

brenschluss 11y ago

You're saying: the efficacy of a UX can be predicted entirely by the UI's adherence to other UI. Which is also an erroneous statement. I use vi(m) on OSX. vi's UI "does not match the standard appearance and interface of the rest of the operating system." Thus, I predict that VI has a horrible UX. However, I am incorrect. Why is this so?