I love everything about Slack except the damn chat window. Oh, and the pricing. The onboarding process is buttery smooth, and there are tons of integrations. But there's so little in the way of communication density (even in 'compact mode') that I miss IRC.
We have a jira integration set up and every ticket consumes five lines plus plenty of whitespace - a few of those and there's no real comms visible on the page. Every integration I've see consumes gobs of space. Similarly, flagging announcements by assigning a colour is almost worthless - the colour bar isn't very visible (I prefer hipchat's method, where the entire chatline gets the background colour set). Then there's the problem of people's actual chat messages being the least visible thing on the page - smaller and less noticable than names, integration notifications, what have you. But the onboarding is so easy, it just sucks users up.
Being able to see a conversation instead of bells and whistles? I miss that... but plain text scares regular users...
I hear those complaints, we found them early on too. We have since separated operational noise in to other channels that ONLY contain integration related stuff, and try to keep one channel purely for actual chatter.
We have a jira integration set up and every ticket consumes five lines plus plenty of whitespace - a few of those and there's no real comms visible on the page. Every integration I've see consumes gobs of space. Similarly, flagging announcements by assigning a colour is almost worthless - the colour bar isn't very visible (I prefer hipchat's method, where the entire chatline gets the background colour set). Then there's the problem of people's actual chat messages being the least visible thing on the page - smaller and less noticable than names, integration notifications, what have you. But the onboarding is so easy, it just sucks users up.
Being able to see a conversation instead of bells and whistles? I miss that... but plain text scares regular users...