@mcc I worked there for a while, 2 things come to mind: the way Slack (the company) uses Slack (the product) is unlike anyone else in the world (we dogfood it a lot), and it hasn't been very successful in translating that to the rest of the world. The second bit is common with other enterprise software: The userbase has very little overlaps, one group does things in a certain way, another in a completely different way. So when a thing changes, it has to accommodate every existing usage pattern.

@mcc they used to be a feature called options, quite a few few websites and applications used to have. Seems that the more things get enshittfied, the less flexibility applications have to be customised to the users requirements. See also: almost everything.

I remember when interfaces like this had drag to rearrange - it doesn’t take much in kb to store them in a json file or config .. but then there’s no metrics to boost shareholder value. </cynic mode=off>

@mcc I completely relate.

Does anyone know of a Slack alternative with a better UI and/or the ability to fully customize your main menu?

@mcc This is not to imply in any way that you're "doing it wrong", but one of your "will never click"s is my favorite button, and there are a couple others you don't use that I do and find somewhat useful. So given all the different ways people use Slack, at least some of those other buttons are not *just* making product managers happy.

I'm not saying Slack is super well designed either. I bet almost everyone finds like half the buttons useful and half annoying, it just varies from person to person which half. (We probably all agree on Slackbot though 😛 )

@mcc I am so glad you wrote this down and got it our of my mind.

@mcc Classic fritterware.

@mcc I use To Do all the time to keep track of what's important. What drives me nuts is the search, which I find unusable. But then there's Jira, and Slack suddenly seems like an oasis of sanity...

@mcc The new focus mode (🌙) is the best thing to happen in a few years IMHO. It's one-click and it doesn't only pause notifications and sets a "I'm focusing" status, it also removes lots of visual clues from the UI. I can keep a channel open in my second screen while coding, but I will just not be distracted by things happening in other channels because the unread markers are hidden. It's perfect.

@mcc For me, the only way to survive Slack is to enable focus mode and live in the activity tab, clearing out messages that I've handled. Once a day I leave focus mode to clear the rest.

@mcc The Slack UI annoys me in a dozen little ways that I can't quite put my finger on. I feel like it was made by managers in meetings and not by programmers who actually use it.

@mcc i hate that i can't hide the slackbot button

@mcc The Slackbot one got me — "will never click, and also resent" is exactly how I feel about it too. Mine's mostly Home and DMs as well, the rest just sits there.

@mcc Remember when the DMs side-tab and the Activity side-tab both got the notification numbers for new DMs (which are already also visible on the home side-tab!), but they didn't get incremented at exactly the same time, so it always looked like you were getting something new even when it was just the same DM surfaced a different way?

I dunno if they ever actually fixed that or not; I disabled Activity/DMs integration as soon as the feuding project managers at Slack relented and allowed this.

@mcc I did you the "Saved" button because I would do a quick pass on work slack and mark all channels read while marking specific messages to review later. Then they changed it to the "to-dos" which required me to set a 'due by' which sucked. Then mystifyingly they brought backed "Saved” but kept "to-dos" in latest update (on my work slack anyway). It's baffling.

But yeah most of it is useless cruft.

@mcc there's some control for us users over what appears there, but as usual, it tends to reset itself every so often and new shit is dumped on users