3 ms·

While you're right in a broad sense, I think in fairness slack has a lot of polish where others tools don't -- they get a lot of UX details right that seem "obv

by jonahx 12y ago

While you're right in a broad sense, I think in fairness slack has a lot of polish where others tools don't -- they get a lot of UX details right that seem "obvious" because they are getting them right. But they're actually far from trivial.

nitrogen 12y ago
One thing they get really wrong is embedded code snippets. The formatting, chrome, and UX around snippets is not as good as HipChat.
- _asummers 12y ago
  If you gist the snippet beforehand, the experience is almost identical. This is obviously an extra step, but then your snippet isn't 100% tied to Slack. I have an app installed that gists my clipboard with a keyboard shortcut, and copies the link to my clipboard, so it's just an extra key chord.
- tragic 12y ago
  Eh, it gets the basic monospace-preserve-whitespace stuff right. It's good enough for me 99% of the time, and if it isn't, I normally want to be debugging somewhere other than a chat app. What Slack does very well is giving a good enough experience for programmers to do shop-talk, and ample opportunities for chatbot yak-shaves, it's also perfectly well usable for non technical people. I work for $ENORMOCORP, and after a couple of brave pioneers among the tech people, now everyone's falling over themselves to get their teams a Slack instance. (As others have said here, the ability to have multiple instances is pretty fundamental to this dynamic - we have team-specific Slacks, product specific, project specific and what have you. I certainly would not want some more 'old fashioned' colleagues seeing that NSFW bollocks people keep wiring into the tech specific chatbots...) This strikes me as a pattern with some potential for growth - tech people driving adoption among non-technical colleagues. I reserve judgement on whether that's $3bn worth of potential.

3 ms·

While you're right in a broad sense, I think in fairness slack has a lot of polish where others tools don't -- they get a lot of UX details right that seem "obv

by jonahx 12y ago

nitrogen 12y ago
One thing they get really wrong is embedded code snippets. The formatting, chrome, and UX around snippets is not as good as HipChat.
- _asummers 12y ago
  If you gist the snippet beforehand, the experience is almost identical. This is obviously an extra step, but then your snippet isn't 100% tied to Slack. I have an app installed that gists my clipboard with a keyboard shortcut, and copies the link to my clipboard, so it's just an extra key chord.
- tragic 12y ago
  Eh, it gets the basic monospace-preserve-whitespace stuff right. It's good enough for me 99% of the time, and if it isn't, I normally want to be debugging somewhere other than a chat app. What Slack does very well is giving a good enough experience for programmers to do shop-talk, and ample opportunities for chatbot yak-shaves, it's also perfectly well usable for non technical people. I work for $ENORMOCORP, and after a couple of brave pioneers among the tech people, now everyone's falling over themselves to get their teams a Slack instance. (As others have said here, the ability to have multiple instances is pretty fundamental to this dynamic - we have team-specific Slacks, product specific, project specific and what have you. I certainly would not want some more 'old fashioned' colleagues seeing that NSFW bollocks people keep wiring into the tech specific chatbots...) This strikes me as a pattern with some potential for growth - tech people driving adoption among non-technical colleagues. I reserve judgement on whether that's $3bn worth of potential.