What do you find "suboptimal" and "tablet-like" about it?
In particular, my issue with modern IM app UIs is that the chat switcher is merged with the chat list. You can't have multiple chats that you're currently active in open at once and switch quickly between them. If you switch away from a chat, you have to find it again in the list to return to it, possibly requiring a lot of scrolling and multiple clicks for what could've been one click or even a keyboard shortcut.
Ctrl + / lets you see all the short cuts.
That's because nobody uses more than one window. Remember, Discord was for gamers, not the tech zealot with a taskbar full of windows. Speaking from experience, I've had extremely low success trying to get normal people to understand windows. So a one-window-contains-all design is great for normal people. This design is also shared by Skype, LINE, and other mainstream chat software. Modern email clients also follow this design paradigm.
And if you still doubt me, remember: The two most popular operating systems in the world, iOS and Android, do not have windows.
Windows are a failed analogy as files-and-folders, normal people do not understand them and software for normal people rightfully don't use them.
Weird claim regarding files and folders. In my experience, my pretty tech illiterate relatives have a pretty strong grasp for them. Younger people do not, because they only use mobile computers that don't make frequent use of that abstraction.
Why are they a failed analogy? What are normal people doing instead of using them?
They do things very simply.
Most people can not multi task, which means they only ever work with one window at a time. They get immediately confused with multiple windows. Likewise files and folders, most people can't grasp what they can't physically see so the very concept of files and folders inside a computer is pig latin and they just dump everything on their desktop which they can physically see.
A lot of tech nerd sensibilities are based upon very specific assumptions that just don't apply to most people, normal people. Anyone who wants to say anything about human interface design needs to first go out into the real world and see how real, normal people actually use computers.
I think we can afford to admit that this is a bit reductive and misrepresentative of the efforts required.
It's easy to see here too, not the least the infamous DropBox comment.
What do they dump on their desktop? Surely it is files and folders!
You have to keep mobile and desktop OSes separate. Mobile OSes are for use on-the-go and mainly focus on content consumption and getting most out of a pocketable touchscreen. Desktop OSes, in contrast, are for productivity. People understand browser tabs, how would a tabbed chat window be so fundamentally different?
> Modern email clients also follow this design paradigm.
Email clients are different. You don't usually jump between messages/threads back and forth like you do all the time in IM clients when you're actively chatting in several conversations at once. You open them one by one, read them, and go do something else after no unread emails are left.
On the contrary, I often have multiple emails open at once, since it's pretty common for me to need to reference information from other emails in the one I'm currently writing - usually to reference past conversations or lookup addresses that didn't make it into my contacts.
My anecdata suggests they don't. I have tried teaching normal people how tabs work, but I might as well be speaking pig latin.
But on desktop, tabs are plainly visible all the time and it's very easy to discover how they work.
I hate all these simplified designs we see in computers now just like most of the other weird people here, but those designs are not for a lack of good reasons.