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Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

People often confuse engineering and design. Slack has a very good design team, the UX is far above IRC or competing solutions and everything flows and works in a way that most users expect. The engineering itself is not the strong point, that's for sure. Slow, bandwidth hungry, memory intensive, strange syncing problems, security issues, etc.

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It's certainly pretty. It reminds me of that quote by Joel Spolsky - "people ridiculously overvalue aesthetics and beauty when evaluating products. It's one of the reasons iPods, and, for that matter, Keanu Reeves, are so successful."

I don't think usability-wise it's all that great though. If you have multiple chatrooms in multiple slack organizations, it's a PITA checking on them all, for instance.

On Spolsky's quote, wouldn't that mean people undervalue aesthetics and beauty?

Engineers undervalue it, users overvalue it compared to other criteria. Mostly because users are not engineers and so have no way to look at why a product is engineeringly superior; they can only look at how easy/simple it is to use.

I really would disagree. IRC didn't have a lot going on, you had channels and PMs and that was kind of it. It was very easy to learn how to use because there was very little to learn.

Not to mention, in most clients, it took significantly less than ten seconds for the text to appear on the screen after you started typing.

There is a lot more to IRC than just channels and PMs - it's just that not many people have purpose to find out about anything else because channels and PMs work so damn well for their purpose.... communication.

While I agree and personally prefer IRC, people using slack use far more features than just channels and PMs. That's because slack is more discoverable and the features are generally conceptually simpler and more obvious for the average user than complicated IRC features. That's the UX I was talking about above - it allows more users to use more features and feel more comfortable that they know what is going on. The same really can't be said for IRC - most average users will request the help of an 'IRC master' if they need something they don't know how to do. That's probably not a good sign of accessible UX.

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