A simpler, more organized Slack | Hacker News Reader

A simpler, more organized Slack

slackhq.com

61 pointsrkwz58 comments

If anyone from Slack reads this: One tiny idea. Just because I entered a dot or a word into a chat doesn't mean I don't expect to find that chat or group in the exact same spot next time.

By all means put a symlink in a virtual Drafts folder but leave the original alone.

This is SOOO annoying

Users are lower on the sidebar, I go to write something and it’s not showing up there anymore.

I then have to stop, start looking closer until I remember or click cmd+k (mac) and then type the name.

This is so annoying.

Slack, _please_ add the ability to not be notified about general messages on Linux. I want to only have the app icon change to red if I get a private message or @'d. The blue dot is distracting noise. I edit the app's source code to remove the blue dot, but have to continually do it every time Slack updates.

Fitting into these new features, it'd be great if for each channel folder I could pick how I want activity within them to notify me.

EDIT: it's possible this is only a Linux (or at least, non-Mac) problem. It seems Mac users do have the ability to do this.

Isn't this what muting channels does?

You have to mute all channels individually. I basically want "global mute"

In the Slack options, there is: `Show a badge on Mac on Slack's icon to indicate new activity` which is by default checked and `Bounce Slack's icon when receiving a notification` which is by default unchecked. Perhaps you want to flip both of these?

I also don't get notifications for general messages anywhere. There are 3 levels of notification settings, "Notify me about...": 1. "All new messages", 2. "Direct messages, mentions and keywords", 3. "Nothing". I use (2) everywhere.

I believe the badge options are Mac specific. I am on Ubuntu and talking with some Mac users just now they don't have the problem I have. On Ubuntu, there is no way (at least that I can tell), to disable the blue dot on new message. The only way I've been able to do it is with this:

https://superuser.com/a/1503241/45125

I have disabled notifications and that works as expected.

By “simpler” I’m sure they mean “lower memory footprint” and “more stable” - right?

I would really just be happy if they made the video calls work more reliably. It’s really important now that my whole team is working from home. It’s a common occurrence that video calls fail to connect and everyone going into a call has to restart their client.

Over the years Slack has become more and more bloated. I think the scope has increased beyond where it’s possible to have a stable Electron app. It’s a shame because the core functionality they offer seems like it should be pretty simple to get right.

> By “simpler” I’m sure they mean “lower memory footprint” and “more stable” - right?

Maybe, but most of the changes that triggered this blog post are UI/UX related as you can see in these GIFs [1][2][3][4].

[1] https://slackhq.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/2020-04_Risma...

[2] https://slackhq.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/2020-04_Risma...

[3] https://slackhq.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/2020-04_Risma...

[4] https://slackhq.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/2020-04_Risma...

If you read beyond two words from the title, you'll see the full title is "Introducing a simpler, more organized Slack" which includes "organized", so probably not related to performance or stability in any way.

Subtitle is "We’re releasing a series of improvements that make working in Slack easier for everyone" which also implies this is all UX work.

Your whole comment feels off-topic in regards to this, and could have been made to any Slack submission to HN. Maybe there should be a different channel for general complaints?

I should have rephrased. I believe Slack's UX team is looking for solutions to problems nobody actually cares about. Meanwhile the tempo of so-called improvements that end up being harmful to the product seems to have made the entire app unstable. The fact that they have to publicly back away from new features after customers revolt, like their ill-fated rich text editor, seems to confirm that nobody wants this stuff.

In my opinion I think Slack's time would be better spent collecting money and maybe building native clients for various operating systems. It was fine in 2017. I wish their UX team would just stop.

I am a Slack user, and I am super excited for the changes in this announcement, especially custom channel organization.

Thank you, Slack, for this UX work.

Making slack simpler and easier for everyone could be accomplished by.. removing features. Which in turn would boost performance and reduce memory usage. I'd actually really like if that was the case, instead of them leaning into more bad UI practices ala the broken WYSIWYG editor of doom.

Seems like Slack is focusing a lot on making the app more accessible for enterprises with email-like message composer or "no-fancy-shortcuts" navigation. While some of these improvements are nice, I feel like Slack has been going downhill ux-wise for some time now:

- new input box, obviously, which messes up the message even when turned off (edited message with code block will often be different than what I just sent)

- people with message drafts moving on the list, as many people mentioned here already

- often an action I did by mistake can't be undone by pressing escape: drafting a post, opening image. I can't reproduce this always so it seems like a bug

- I now sometimes can't see person's details by clicking their image for some reason? I need to click their name, but even that not always works. Also not reproducible 100% of the time, so looks like a bug

- notifications on Android are broken: they don't disappear when I read a message elsewhere, sometimes I get mobile notifications _for a conversation I'm having on the desktop_.

- when I write someone with notifications off/snoozed, I'm immediately pinged about this. And every single time I'm thinking that person maybe is online and replied, but it's always Slack pinging me, with notification and all, that it's actually the opposite

- I often see people working while appearing offline, myself included, because apparently Slack decided to stop asking if I want to go online after I decline it once or twice (the night before)

Basically Slack is less and less friendly. I used to advocate for it as it was a huge step up from HipChat that we used, but if it was up to me now, I'd be looking for alternatives.

This article has 50MB of GIFs to download. Be careful if you're metered.

Tip for desktop users: uBlock Origin (amongst others) lets you block media elements larger than n KB. You can then choose to selectively load in specific blocked media elements.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

Does this feature also work on uBlock Origin for mobile browsers?

Just tested, it appears to work.

They also just make it hard to concentrate on actually reading this announcement. A bit gratuitous.

Ouch. When will web developers learn to use HTML5 video? Not only it weighs 10x smaller, but user can actually stop and replay more interesting parts, instead of waiting for another loop. They at least should use loading="lazy" attribute.

Why don't browsers add playback controls for .gif animations as well? It's kind of hard to rewind a .gif because of its layering structure, but rewinding video is similarly hard due to B/P-frames

Because animated GIFs are horribly inefficient and their use should no longer be encouraged.

Should browsers add speed controls for the blink tag as well?

> This article has 50MB of GIFs to download. Be careful if you're metered.

Might want to not use Slack if you're metered. It downloads some 400+ MB into your browser cache.

While we are asking for slack features, can we PLEASE have an option to notify once, and only once on mobile for group messages?

I have several co-workers who will chat me while i'm driving, or otherwise unable to respond, and having my phone binging every few seconds is incredibly annoying.

Light Flow on Android, a notification manager app, has this. "Alert Throttling". Max of one notification every X seconds/minutes.

I wish Slack had this, too.

Light flow is pretty amazing and I'm surprised phone makers haven't at least integrated some of the features.

It started out as a way to do custom LED sequences, but you can also set custom vibration patterns (at the millisecond level) for every type of notification.

Tangent time?

The power of vibration is heavily under-appreciated (less by Apple than by everyone else).

Our phones are great at precisely creating many different vibration patterns and humans are pretty good at distinguishing them. We're even more sensitive when it's happening on our wrists.

Yet instead of using this to create personal and expressive notification experiences, most manufacturers opt to barely give the user a choice and just turn on the vibration motor for way too long (or do that twice!), simply creating a sensation of pain every time.

> Organize channels, messages and apps into custom, collapsible sections (you know, like folders)

Looking at my three-screens-long list of channels, this is a welcome change.

An incredible improvement. I really hope they improve notifications at some point. In some channels, I don’t even want the bold font indicating unread messages.

I'm still waiting for the ability to be notified for all non-bot messages in a channel, which they told me they were working on, uh, 7 years ago.

This has a social solution, which is to complain about bots being added to channels that are for human discussions. ;)

It has a fairly successful track record for me.

I leave those channels muted. They'll be greyed out at the bottom of the channels list when there are new messages.

Great, although i really wish they focused on performance first... on my year old xps typing in slack is like trying to run in a vat of custard. I wish I could turn of their horrible wysiwyg thing until it sees a line ending because it's clearly evaling on every keystroke.

The wysiwyg editor can be disabled on desktop, thanks to all the noise devs made after the switch.

that only disables the UI, it's still slow.

> Hasta la vista, context switching.

Context switching is more about time wasted stopping one task to pick up another. Slack's context switch is when I'm working on something else and the OS pings me to let me know someone needs me.

When Slack wants my attention, it pings me instantly, and it will ping me repeatedly if a person... is typing... like... Captain Kirk... talks.

People have tried to address[1] this sort of problem through teaching, but even if you could get people to read that, there's a degree of systemic complexity in interaction. Many situations just don't lend themselves to writing up a detailed question ahed of time.

Slack could mitigate this through technical means. Hell, the OS could do a better job. Take it further, I'd love to centralize notifications through some service across multiple devices.

One possibility is to debounce notifications as we do with events in UIs. In practice, it means Slack holds my messages for a few minutes before I get a notification. Ideally, the other person should see this so they realize I'm not going to instantly acknowledge their Hi message. And people who type bit by bit can do so knowing it won't give me a flood of notifications.

The other possibility is scheduled notification times for low priority stuff. It's good advice to work in blocks, so it'd make sense at the end of a block for notifications to pop up if they're available.

[1]: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

A few of the UI changes - top search bar, activity and files tabs, compose button - first appeared in MS Teams some time back.

I wonder how much the competition forced Slack to think more about the UI/UX of it's product.

I'm happy for any improvement to the chaos but I that statement about "fancy" shortcuts doesn't meam they're getting rid of any. Keyboards are the fastest way to navigate a well designed system.

Also I hope this doesn't mean they're forcing that input box on us again. That was a fustercluck.

My favorite Slack feature was never knowing for sure which of the 5 buttons in the upper right corner contained the thing I was looking for.

It's that sort of uncertainty that reminded me of life's uncertainties in general on a regular basis.

Mine is how it will reposition your channel or DM name in the sidebar if you start writing a message, but switch to another section for a moment. I opened an issue about it because I felt like I was losing my mind. Didn't I just have this open right here? Where did it go? No, it gets placed in some Drafts section. They won't fix it or create a toggle to stop doing this because leaving me in a confused state is more productive apparently.

And don't get me started on the little Slackbot notifications for absolutely everything. (Yes, Slackbot. I requested everything in the channel to be collapsed. I know what that means. You don't have to drop a message every single time. Ffs.)

Moving things into Drafts is the single worst thing they've done, topping even the super-terrible rich-text changes.

Copying something into Drafts, sure, I can see that. But moving it? Absolutely broken to the point of unusability.

When are these features available? It's not listed, and it doesn't seem to be in the current version.

Asked support, rolled out over the "next couple of weeks." Typical fanfare, no way to opt in or out. No way of knowing when it'll all change, or the ability to give a heads up to your company.

If you aren't on the betas[1], that's a good place to start. I got an update today, haven't seen any new behavior yet, though.

1: https://slack.com/help/articles/226192087-Join-Slack%E2%80%9...

The update today seemed to be bringing beta back in line with stable. (4.4.0 was in beta for a bit, and it was released today).

Years ago I wrote in and had an exchange with someone at Slack regarding "folders" for channels. I begged for the feature, and included some mock screenshots showing how they could do it. This was before Discord did it.

Anyway I got a tone deaf response, and someone on the Slack team passionately arguing that "folders" were too complicated and that nobody needed them and that 21 characters for the names were enough. I wrote back, and they doubled down on how folders were a bad idea.

The response almost turned me off Slack.

Anyway glad they finally changed their tune. Will really help people with dozens of channels stay organized.

Can’t help but feel like the timing here is very unfortunate - surely the pandemic has forced a lot of people to try various remote working tools for the first time this week, including Slack. Rolling out a major update just days after a lot of new users come onboard. Might be a source of confusion.

Anyone know how to enable this new UI?

Looking at their release logs it seems that the new UI is still not released but will be released during march

You have to be a paid user, and they're rolling it out automatically over the course of a few weeks.

My org has just started using Slack (probably like many others), while I used it before because of my college capstone team -- hoping this helps incentivize them to adopt it!

If it's not FOSS and an open protocol, it's not relevant.

That would be simple and correctly organized.

For you perhaps. There is no denying that Slack is relevant to many people given there are 10mil+ daily active users.

I was talking about being "simple and organized". If it's opaque and closed, it's not relevant whether the insides of it are organized.

Must be for their app only, the web version is still the same

> The rollout starts today and will continue over the next several weeks

Isn’t the app an electron app? I imagine they try to share UI. Not sure about that though, it’d be interesting to learn more.

The desktop app is just wrapper on their web app.

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