Comment by asah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asah | Hacker News Reader

Love Zulip! Simple architecture, amazing packaging release/upgrade process and very developer friendly at all levels! I actually pulled away from Facebook, invited everyone to a Zulip server, hacked on it to provide changes people wanted, and we're loving it. Login-with-Google was trivial to setup. Some users prefer to email the server and the gateway was so easy to setup. Search Just Worked(tm). It's fast. It's easy to admin. and and and...

I have only one complaint... but it's a biggie: the UI/UX.

I don't normally care, but literally every one of my users has commented that it's an ugly duckling - both the mobile app and website. We'd gladly pay for something prettier:

- UI is inconsistent: layouts/fonts/icons vary by screen and surface

- UX buries common features (e.g. reply, reaction) and promotes uncommon features (e.g. invite new user). UX is rough, e.g. click-targets are tiny and not always obvious, and features are hidden behind mouseover.

- promotes the name "Zulip" all over, which is a problem for users who don't know what a Zulip is or why they'd want one, e.g. emails from "Zulip" and not the name of the community.

- needs a way to "nudge" conversations into a smaller set of topics/threads, e.g. suggestions.

- conversation UI still suffers from scaling issues and needs some reddit-like way to display larger conversations...

- no way to control which previews are shown/hidden

Seriously, pls hire a no-nonsense designer and stop trying to be clever! UI/UX is too important in this category of product, and the current design holds back adoption.

Head of Product for Zulip here. We appreciate the feedback! We are actively recruiting for a designer role (https://zulip.com/jobs/#designer), and making these types of improvements will be a major priority in the coming year.

I agree with the OP, but I have to say that your keyboard navigation is second to none. Also, please keep Zulip fast, it's the biggest reason why it's so great to use.

+1 to this!

I saw that! in the commit stream during today's upgrade. I'll riffle my network - design is always tough, and designing for Zulip is esp tricky given its extensibility.

Very much agree: Zulip is fantastic, except for the UI (mostly the look & feel) which makes difficult to convince non-tech users to adopt Zulip instead of Slack.

I as a coder love zulip[1]. I don't really understand why non-coders have problems, but obviously they have them. I fear when they get a "professional" UI designer things might not improve from my perspective, very much the opposite.

[1] With one exception. The search is too fuzzy. We have 3 years of technical disscussions in zulip. Finding code snippets you exist is often impossible. A real grep interface would be great. Optional of course for thos who know regexps. Yeah, I can harvest my own copy of the chat history using the REST API and grep there. My code to do so has fallen into disuse...

I got off it, even though it's second to none in it's niche.

It turns out I just don't have the time/patience for online software. It didn't do a good job offline, they have no native client for OSX, I just don't have the learned tolerance for all this. Even though it's good.

Still sucks to use, if you use it a lot.

My main problem with Zulip is that it seems like a bunch of vi/emac users got together and developed a GUI chat app. It’s impossible to use for new uswrs. But once you become a power user and learn all the keyboard shortcuts it’s great.

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