It's times like this I wish there was a solid decentralized standard to pick from, but there's no clear choice between XMPP and Matrix.
mIRC is pretty straight forward compared to that.
The reason is that when you sit there clicking through a bunch of menus to find something in QuickBooks (or a typical atrocious enterprise app), nobody sees you; and if you screw something up there, you spend some more time fixing it and nobody sees the screwup. Frustrating maybe, as you waste time, but almost everyone has some frustrating wastes of time at work.
If you're on IRC and people are talking at you and you sit there fumbling to figure out how to respond, it's like you're in a conversation and tongue-tied and everyone's looking at you. And if you screw something up, like send a message to the wrong channel... now you've done it in front of all your coworkers, in real time. Humans hate looking stupid in front of the group.
And if you screw something up on IRC in front of your coworkers, and you're someone with even a little anxiety about not being tech-savvy... that's going to flare right up.
Also, because now you're embarrassed, you're going to want something to blame. So you blame the tool.
QuickBooks doesn't have to suffer in comparison to better UX performing similar tasks in people's personal lives while IRC can be compared (unfavorably) to texting apps, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, AIM once upon a time, etc.
If you're setting it up in a corporate environment, just change the ini files so it autoconnects to your server. It'll pop up a list of channels they can join. The server can SAJoin them to particular channels on connection too. The UI is very clean and lightweight: a channel scrolls messages and they appear, there's an input bar at the bottom, and there's a list of users on the side. It's written in MFC and Win32 APIs, so it's blazingly fast compared to most applications, and you can find a version that will run on every computer made in the past 25 years.
The united states military used mIRC extensively for battle field coordination. I think it's up to the task of handling bob from accounting.
Even if mIRC would suffice for Windows, you've not handled Macs, phones, etc. Who gives a shit if it runs on a 25 year old computer?
The US military has produced some specific examples of good design but isn't known highly valuing usability, let alone whether someone would enjoy using a tool. IRC is very functional and mIRC appears to add a little polish beyond a pure command-line interface, those are bare minimums and not good enough.
ok
> It has a sidebar to list channels but the current channel window is still an undifferentiated mess of handles, commands, and actual conversation.
No.
Each channel and private message get their own MDI window you are free to minimize, maximize or layout however you want.
Notifications are turned on by default, but they can be disabled. You'll get a tray notification if mIRC is minimized, and inside the title bar of the window will flash. Notifications happen when your nick is mentioned.
There's a horizontal line that goes across the dialog window that indicates the location of the conversation the last time it was focused.
>Even if mIRC would suffice for Windows, you've not handled Macs, phones, etc. Who gives a shit if it runs on a 25 year old computer?
Other clients work on other platforms. mIRC is just what I brought up since it's desktop windows client and that the most common case for an office environment.
> The US military has produced some specific examples of good design but isn't known highly valuing usability, let alone whether someone would enjoy using a tool. IRC is very functional and mIRC appears to add a little polish beyond a pure command-line interface, those are bare minimums and not good enough.
It's a simple, light-weight way for people to send short text messages in near real time with tens of thousands of people. I think that's good enough, and it works at a scale that far surpasses the SaaS chat options.
Matrix has Riot (https://riot.im/app) but personally I find it incredibly confusing.
I don't think it's a problem if something needs to be initially deployed and configured by an IT department (or otherwise tech savvy individual or group), as long as its onboarding and primary usage flows are straightforward. An arbitrary non-tech-savvy but internet-familiar employee needs to be able to create an account, browse and join rooms, and search through history without any hand-holding. Slack and its direct competitors pass this test. IRC doesn't. Does Spark?