How We Want To Fix Team Chat | Hacker News Reader

How We Want To Fix Team Chat

awesomatic.com

107 pointstoddmorey54 comments

It's not entirely clear from the text what these guys mean by "threaded replies", so I must assume from their screenshot they mean replies which come in in threaded order. And this is, I think, a terrible idea. I understand the need: you can't tell who's replying to what. But the fix is wrong.

Unlike, say, HN or reddit, chats are real-time things. Like most real-time things we perceive and digest them as streams which dribble in one message at a time. As humans we're designed to perceive and understand real-time things as streams: video, audio, events, timelines. We can sit right at the point of "now" and watch every single one of the messages come in, and respond to the ones we need to.

Threaded replies don't come in in a stream order. They get scattered throughout the space of all messages from all points of time. They're buried under heaps of hierarchies or lost off-page. Even if you're cued into the fact that they've arrived, you have to go hunt for them, a cognitively challenging task which takes away from following the stream of time. It's as if late books to a library didn't come in through the late book slot but rather magically appeared all over the library, back on their respective shelves, where you had to go manually find each one of them and stamp it returned.

Excellent point and this is certainly a feature that we are tweaking the dials on. We've currently landed on a solution where a reply comes in as the latest item (in chronological order) with a reference back to the original message. That saves you from the tedious work of describing who you are replying to in a fast moving chatroom. That view persists throughout your active session. Later, when you return for reference, the chat lines organize themselves in the threaded view you see in the screenshot. It's starting to feel right but like all the features, we need to live with them a while to know for sure.

I've always loved SBNation's solution for this. When you're logged in, comments auto-refresh (still in the original threaded tree form), and there are keyboard navigation shortcuts for navigating comments and marking them as read (so that when new comments come in, you can then navigate only the new ones). There are also "up" links to the parent comment. Another huge benefit compared to something like HN is that it saves the state of which comments have been shown to you to your user account, so if you close the window and come back to the discussion later it knows exactly which comments came in since you were last on the page, so you can quickly review only the new content.

It creates (especially for real-time stuff like discussing an ongoing sports game) a fantastic blend of the live nature of a chat with the ability to have deeper individual discussions (through the threading preservation and display) at the same time.

I have to agree with this. I believe threaded reply systems (in combination with upvote systems) work reasonably well to produce digestible and shallow conversations (in terms of the number of participants, not necessarily quality) for news articles, but are absolutely terrible for conversations that happen in real time, grow to a certain length, or are expected to be read in full by participants.

The reasoning for real-time conversations has already been stated, but as for the other two aspects, I offer the following anecdotes:

I have serious trouble reading the comments for Hacker News articles that receive somewhere upwards of 50 replies, and not just because of the quality of the comments that those articles tend to attract.

I am incapable of browsing anything but the tiniest of subreddits for the same reason. The lack of visual cues for reply depth other than minor indentation and the sheer quantity of comments on the average article there are enough to make it literally stressful for me to read.

I have absolutely no problem following IRC all day, going to sleep, and catching up on IRC logs in the morning.

I regularly read, in full, and even participate in threads on 4chan and other forums that exceed several hundreds of posts in length, and not just ones full of throwaway one-liners and amusing pictures.

Google Wave tried this, and it was interesting and completely unusable.

I keep seeing this over and over on numerous landing pages: Why do people run ads for other companies? Do you guys get Apple hardware at a discount and must show them in your pictures?

This has nothing to do with being for or against any vendor. It's alienating your users, and you never want to do that. Brands communicate emotions, it's risky to expose yourself to that. Or is that on purpose?

I don't believe that's necessarily true. This is more passive than active, and piggybacking off an universally recognized brand can be quite beneficial.

Apple has spent billions of dollars crafting a brand that inspires trust, quality, and modernness - and regardless of how an individual feels about Apple on a conscious level, the strong majority probably associate those three things with Apple products.

Slapping a Macbook Air in their design passively speaks to viewers by saying "we're a quality brand, you can trust us, and we're the future in this outdated industry." If you look around, you'll actually see that a lot of successful startups (usually post-first generation) piggyback off one aspect or another of established brands.

I think you are right about the brand transference, although to be perfectly honest, we hadn't thought it out that far. Our real reasoning was simply to clearly delineate the screenshots from the rest of the page. It would be fascinating to A/B test laptops and no laptops to see if there's a perceivable difference.

"This has nothing to do with being for or against any vendor."

I think it has everything to do with that specific vendor (not your comment, the unpaid ad). When was the last time you saw a landing page featuring an Acer or Asus laptop?

"Brands communicate emotions, it's risky to expose yourself to that. Or is that on purpose?"

It's clearly on purpose. The (desired) communicated emotion is along the lines of "we're hip and trendy and use only the cream of the crop".

Apple's hardware design is much less distracting for mockup presentations and given the OS, the type is more legible (see below). As a designer, I don't want my work pasted onto a ThinkPad with all of the blinky lights, colored buttons and aged edges taking away from the intent.

*This is not to excuse designers who don't test their typography under ClearType, but rather if there's a way to make my work look better naturally, I'm going to use it.

Do you have some sort of basis for claiming it's less distracting? I mean, I get that it has a certain visual appeal, and I readily accept your font claim, knowing little about font rendering.

But I'm not at all convinced that an Apple laptop is less distracting than a Lenovo laptop. After all, we're discussing it in the comments, aren't we?

We're discussing it because people would rather believe that it has something to do with elitism rather than sheer simplicity. Google image search shows that most Lenovos suffer the same fate with the edges, unless you're talking about the IdeaPad, whose screen is flush, but the juxtaposition between a white keyboard body and a black screen would be too harsh for me to use it in a shot.

Oh come on. The Macbook Air is sexy no matter what your "brand politics" are. It just makes your screenshots look more beautiful than say putting them on a picture of some plastic laptop you find at Walmart... or Best Buy... or everywhere. Why put it on a computer at all, you may ask. It gets people imagining themselves using it on a physical device. A screenshot can be beautiful and persuasive by itself but having one on a piece of hardware allows you to imagine using that hardware along with the software. And if both the hardware and software are beautiful then it makes the effect more powerful.

Honestly, I don't see how it alienates anyone unless you're actually against the vendor. I mean, you say you aren't but let's be real. It comes off like that's where you're coming from.

> Honestly, I don't see how it alienates anyone unless you're actually against the vendor.

So, I have nothing against the MacBook Air (in fact, I love it, and am typing this comment on one: this is my favorite computer I have ever owned, by far); however, I know a lot of my friends do (believing Apple machines to be the anti-thesis of computers, etc.), and they are the kinds of people who might be in the market for useful software.

I guess you can say "those people are closed-minded: I don't want them using my software", but with that attitude you very rapidly realize you wouldn't want to sell to anyone (often including yourself, once you really approach the problem of avoiding closed-mindedness with an open mind ;P). To me, an abstract device would work just as well.

After reading through the entire page, this sounds like quite some feature-creep. It seems to support every way in which you can possibly organize communication :-).

Here are a few questions:

• Does it run in a web browser?

• Does it work on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Android, iOS, …?

• Is it a service or can I host it on my own server? After all, it targets the team chat "problem", and oftentimes the things discussed in team chats are confidential.

• Is it based on some other chat protocol, e.g. IRC or XMPP multi user channels? Or do I need to get everyone on the team to switch over to it?

would love to explore this but only if i could host it on my own server.

Thanks for asking these questions. I gave myself a head smack for not including some of this info on the page itself. I'll add in, but answer here:

1. Absolutely runs in a browser and we're doing all we can to make it a first-class citizen. The idea is that you can bring ad hoc members to the team without them having to do any setup.

2. We're starting to build out native apps with deeper integrations (ie, the Mac notification center). We're starting with the commercial desktop and mobile platforms, but as a big fan of Linux I'm eager to have a native client there, too.

3. Right now it's a hosted service, but others, too, have brought up the sensitivity of team data. Reminds me of how Memoto received feedback that eventually brought them to incorporate an option for local storage rather than pushing images to their servers automatically.

4. At this early stage it's a custom protocol, but that was the fastest way to stand up our interface layer. I do think it would greatly help adoption to be XMPP compatible and we're digging in to the potential of that. Video / audio (which is used to complement the chat) is based on WebRTC.

IRC compatibility at the last is fantastic, and it's a simple protocol. Flowdock offers this (and is a similar service).

my workplace uses Hipchat, and they appear XMPP based. You can access it using your IRC client with bitlbee as a bridge (I just set this up this past weekend - I don't know why I didn't do it sooner). Not as simple as direct IRC compatibility, but something I can live with.

I imagine it's easier for them to build custom features on XMPP (since the protocol supports custom messages/actions) rather than IRC (where you'll have to build your tool around IRC's paradigm of chat-rooms and text only chat).

Running in a browser is great for getting started, but anyone who's a web developer will have their browser tank and take down every web-based app with it. For this reason it's always nice to have a native client option. Propane (http://propaneapp.com/) is great example of a simple native client.

Secondly, please, please bundle in XMPP so that writing agents for this kind of app isn't an exercise in sheer frustration.

+1 on the self-hosted. A wishlist in silk accompanied by a 2-ton brick of a deal-breaker. You'd think the most solution-starved demographic for chat would be those behind a corporate firewall...

If we keep building for behind the firewall, then software for firewalls will continue to live. The only way to kill behind the firewall software is to stop building shrink-wrapped software.

Why kill shrink-wrap you ask? Because building and then promptly forgetting about software is a thing of the past. Now we have amazing tools that allow us to build even better solutions. Things like analytics, a/b testing and the cloud are the future for software. Why continue to build in the past?

Looks interesting. Our team also got tired of using traditional chat clients for communication, and we've been using https://www.flowdock.com/ for a year now.

From a consumer's perspective, it's always nicer to have more options to choose from!

As a big chat room user, there's something that bugs me about this. I think that one of the main reasons the chatroom hasn't changed in so long is because it's so simple. You connect and begin chatting. It looks like this idea is putting a big emphasis on organizing, which means that the user has to do more work, which isn't good. But I'm just being the skeptic here, don't mind me.

Wow. As another poster mentioned, this really feels like feature creep. I made it about half-way through the intro before my eyes glazed over and I lost interest because there was so much to absorb. At least I recommend a more streamlined (read: shorter and more compelling) intro.

Personally, I'm going to pass on your product because from your description it feels like it'll be hard to learn, have too many features I'll never use and be slow (due to bloat). :(

Thanks for the comment. I can see that spelled out all together, it feels busy. The great news is that at heart, it's chat and the extras are hidden easily. Our model is a good text editor, with powerful features like code folding and columular selection available but not required learning. If you feel you have to learn awesomatic to use awesomatic, we've missed the mark. All that said, every feature is undergoing a brutal death match for survival. If anything, we see the product getting leaner as we move towards public release. The beta feedback will be invaluable.

Looks interesting, but does it support existing chat protocols like XMPP or IRC?

This is one of the main reasons I stick with Grove ( http://grove.io ) for team chat needs.

IRC backend would be great.

Was going to respond with "chat isn't broken" but I actually quite like the look of this!

Thanks! Our biggest issue that got us headed this direction was how many times we'd use chat to decide something... and then separately need to track those decisions (spreadsheets, project management systems... we tried them all). From our early experience with this approach, it just feels right to have it all in one spot. The added bonus is that the lightweight, informal feel of chat promotes a lot more usage than any other approach we've tried.

The more features you'll add to your products, the less I'll use them. I like clean, simple, readable interfaces because what matter is the information being transported, not the interface around it. I use finch as my IM client, and Mutt for emails.

Make a web client that behaves like a ncurses interface, lives on the server so I can leave it open all the time, and provides an efficient search feature, and then I'll be interested.

This is looking pretty good, especially considering how absolutely terrible Apple has increasingly managed to make iChat/Messages recently.

A huge feature for me and my team would be the ability to use encryption, specifically private/public key pairs. If all messages could be encrypted on the client, then your servers would never store plaintext, and then I think I wouldn't even mind whether you hosted it or not.

I know our organization would like this also, but it basically makes indexing for search pretty impossible doesn't it?

I would make that trade if necessary. Alternatively, the search could happen client side (which I understand is more difficult, which is why I'm willing to have no search)

Most of these concepts are already implemented in Flowdock: https://www.flowdock.com/

This is great. I submitted by gmail account address to be notified when the beta is available. I'll be joining a great company, NGP VAN, that has recently undergone a merger and now has large teams in both DC and Boston. This tool seems like it'd be a great way to help the two dev offices work more closely together. Any ETA on when we could get access?

This looks like an interesting product. However, the marketing copy is in severe need of an editor. There are Bushisms like "honing in on" and paragraphs that end with rhetorical questions. If I were the founders, I would find someone less familiar with the product to hone and polish the copy.

Just a note, "Bushisms" are properly "malapropisms". Not that I'm not a foaming at the mouth socialist (Canada, wooo!), but I find it takes away from someone's real point when they accidentally drag a partisan phrase like that into an apolitical setting.

jcampbell: You are certainly right and I humbly admit we could have spent more time polishing the copy. My English teacher would be heartbroken to hear a direct comparison to The Decider, though that was fair play. I do think a solid editor is a phenomenal resource and an important part of the preflight checklist. I love the essays that thank a handful of people for reading prior drafts.

Still a beautiful website design though.

This looks great. The big deal breaker (or maker) for me and my team is... is it encrypted on the client side?

One of the big features I would like with the thread-based chat is "unread message" support. Since the chat may (should) be updated live as messages are sent, they could be all over the place. An example of a site that does this well is sbnation.com.

Pinged you on Twitter, but I'd love an invite for our small (< 10) person team...we literally spend all day on Hipchat and while it's good, something with a bit more organization would be very welcome. Email's in my profile.

I am actively building 'TeamStinct.com' to solve team communication, and especially as a replacement for email.

http://teamstinct.com/

I would be happy if anybody is interested in helping with the project?

Any plans on support Google Apps natively through the Google Apps Marketplace?

Sounds very interesting, but the home page is a bit of information overload. The @@ alert looks really useful. Wish there was a product video. Definitely looking forward to checking it out when it launches.

Maybe it's intentional but you've got a typo in one of your mocks: http://awesomatic.com/images/nested-topics.jpg

It would be cool to be able to try this out for open source projects (with public archives and all of that), though I'd imagine that's not their primary use case :)

This looks awesome. I have the pleasure of knowing the team behind this, and they are insanely capable people who can do what they say.

Can't wait for the beta!

An idea when it's going to be released to the public?

This has been a part-time labor of love, but the more we build/use it, the more we love it. We've recently applied to TechStars to see if we can #domorefaster as they say. Hopefully they take interest in our team. So far, the idea does seem pretty well received... at this point, we plan to pursue it regardless. We want v1 out within the first half of 2013.

Looks nice, want to try it :D

nice

This is really cool. I really hope you guys pull it out!

But I still think the best way to fix team chat is to give people free beer. :)

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