While I personally prefer irc and definitely agree that an open protocol along the lines of irc should be the direction we head towards, I think it may be a bit

While I personally prefer irc and definitely agree that an open protocol along the lines of irc should be the direction we head towards, I think it may be a bit shortsighted to imply users don’t prefer things such as in app searching and it definitely seems they love gifs. I’m pretty sure asking users to leave their app and go to a separate webpage to search wouldn’t sit well with most users, particularly people who are involved in some kind of deadline for their project—what we might brush off as “it’s just like two extra clicks!” is actually much more disrupting. It pulls you out of your workflow and those extra clicks feel like they add up over time. While some of us may sneer at chat apps like Slack, it’s obvious their UX/UI heavily resonates with users. We should be looking at why users absolutely prefer Slack and see if we can build a client based on an open protocol which will give the user experience most users prefer while still maintaining an irc type experience for users like us.