Structured email-like discussions – need feedback
A quick video demonstrating how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JgeAjwyJok
Do you think something like this can be useful? It does solve a problem for me (more details about my motivation below). But I'm curious if anyone else finds it helpful, so I don't end up trying to solve a problem that only exists for me. </TL-DR>
At company where I work we use a chat-based tool for quick real-time discussions, but use email threads for more complex discussions on a specific topic involving multiple people. For example, coming up with a release plan, figuring out how to handle an issue etc.
Although in general our email communication does the job pretty well, there are a few issues with it that I find annoying:
- 2 people do "reply all" at the same time, "crossing" messages - last one wins and the other person's reply is not included on future replies unless someone manually "merges" the 2 replies later.
- Some people intentionally "reply all", but not to the latest message in the thread.
- "Inline replies" are done as a hack by manually adding replies to original message text in message history.
- Fixing typos and making other corrections requires a new message to be sent to everyone.
Sometimes, the result of these issues is a thread with multiple "forks" that are hard to follow and understand. In some cases, important information can even get missed, leading to other issues.
So I wanted to come up with a tool that would natively support things like inline/non-latest message replies and editing existing messages. I have a working prototype as shown in the video, but wanted to get a feel of what others think about its value before committing to doing more work on this.