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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

I was skeptical about Zulip when I first tried it. What is it supposed to be? A chat? A forum? Why is the UI so ugly?

But after using it a while I now really dislike Slack et al, both in professional teams and for open source communities.

Zulip can give you the best of both worlds. It's a regular chat. But the threading model also encourages long-form, more forum or email like discussions.

Threads are easily discoverable and it's trivial to catch up on all the relevant discussions that you missed, while skipping everything that doesn't concern you.

You can still have some regular chat channels for typical ephemeral discussion that no-one is expected to read. It's really a great tool.

The only downside is the very subpar UX when compared to Discord or even Slack.

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I have heard a few people complain about the UI but I like it, and it seems comparable to other chat apps. What about Slack/Discord is better? Genuinely trying to understand.

As for UX, I think Zulip has a strong advantage w/r/t the threading model, which you seem to be saying as well.

I have heard complaints where I work that less-technical foks find the UI unpleasant/confusing. I think it is due to a combination of the keyboard shortcuts being front-and-center and the threading model seeming "complex" (really, just logically structured)

I'm not sure there is a strong/good argument against it, though. e.g. word processors are "more complex" than text files for sure, but people have learned the benefits of those.

I think the education / user-onboarding flow could be improved perhaps.

The usual complaints I get (as an admin of an instance) are: 1. "Hard to search"/"Can't find anything". 2. Off-topic responses because people post in whatever the most recent thread they used happens to be (results in (1)). I like it, though, due to having some similarities to a forum.

Past experience suggests that many folks who are unhappy with Zulip's visuals are satisfied if they do the following things:

* Using the night theme, which some folks strongly prefer to day theme.

* Zooming to 110%, which makes Zulip's font size similar to Slack and its clones.

With any luck, this summer we'll migrate our default font size to match other modern webapps, ideally with a "Dense mode" that preserves the current size for folks who want to fit more content on their screen.

I've thought about changing the default theme to the day theme, but it seems a little sad to remove our current defaut (of automatically detecting the browser configuration via `prefers-color-scheme`).

I strongly prefer the dark theme. My 2 cents is that using that as a default will be a good idea.

FWIW I find the browser configuration check to be flakey in other contexts. Especially with non-technical people, who may never know to toggle dark mode.

I STRONGLY recommend optimizing for the average non technical user and mass adoption. Basically, copy Slack’s visual design as much as you can while retaining what makes Zulip great.

Branding and visual design matters. Far more than most folks think.

> I STRONGLY recommend optimizing for the average non technical user and mass adoption.

I agree with that, and I hope my comment above didn't mean to sound dismissive of concerns about visual design!

Visual work to mean these workarounds are not required is one of our main priorities for the next few months, and I mentioned the above mainly because many folks have found them helpful when using the Zulip that exists today.

(As a sidenote, we have an open position for a designer).

> Basically, copy Slack’s visual design as much as you can

There are a ton of unpleasant / user hostile features of Slack’s visual design. It is full of stuff blinking, flashing, popping in and out of view, etc. Trying to chat feels like having a conversation in the middle of a casino.

So please don’t do this.

And yet the average non tech user took to it like a fish to water compared to all alternatives that came before it.

Please do this - I deployed slack in a business environment - staff love it. Trying to get them to use alternatives with what they call "weird" interfaces is a no go.

Slack nailed it - and adoption numbers are proving that out over and over.

I got complaints even on teams font size being too small! Don't underestimate these issues.

Really? I honestly have no idea what you're referring too, as someone that uses slack at a full time remote job.

Nothing blinks or flashes as far as I'm aware. Just the UI changing when other people interact with the server. Like emoji reactions pop in if someone adds one. Or left side bar highlighting things if there's new messages in them, etc.

Things pretty much any other chat-like application does.

Automatically detecting prefers-color-scheme is the right thing to do in general - maybe the day theme needs some improvements (based purely on this thread).

I tried Zulip a few years ago and found it too "ugly" to recommend to non-technical peers (I also didn't grok the threads model).

I checked the website now to see if I'd like the night mode better, and I can't find any screenshots with it!

If people tend to vastly prefer zulips UI with the settings you mention, your product adoption will probably be much higher if your website screenshots show the dark mode with 110% zoom.

While it'd be nice to improve the defaults, I know that can be disruptive - the quickest quickfix would be to mention those settings in the installation instructions.

Failing the change mentioned above, it would at least be nice to include some screenshots on the help article about turning on night mode (ideally with some good alt text so google images picks it up).

Disclaimer that I only looked at the top two DDG results for "Zulip night mode"

I think zulipchat has a usable UI but it's not as visually inviting as slack. Less brightness, colors, emoji and the like. It might actually have support for this stuff now as I've not tested the latest version. I'm not saying this stuff should be added but that's my takeaway on the differences.

Funny that you enumerated all the crap that I absolutely detest in slack. I think there are really two populations, those who should be considered definitely lost by having had their brain washed by UI vendors ruining user experience, and those who are still trying to get their work done through this ocean of horrors.

Zulip is uglier in every aspect, like colors, icons, spacing and content organization. They should hire or recruit an UI designer.

I had created this extension for my personal use, that "modernizes" the Zulip UI. Most people seem to have a better UI experience using it from the feedback I have received. Feel free to try it out . https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/prettier-zuli...

I think you mean "UI", as in "visuals", because the UX is the best, bar none.

The thing that puts me off is that you have to choose a subject for every message. Bit of a pain. And I can't see how it's threading is significantly better than Slack's.

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