Comment by areoform
15 days ago
Does your app pass the grandma and quarterback test? Can I get my grandma and the group's jock/quaterback to use it without handholding?
15 days ago
Does your app pass the grandma and quarterback test? Can I get my grandma and the group's jock/quaterback to use it without handholding?
I'd say so, especially if you start on desktop and have them watch the 2-minute onboarding video. We are satisfied with what we see with our internal usability studies with nontechnical users.
Among customers, one reference that I can quickly cite is this one:
https://zulip.com/case-studies/gut-contact/
> Agents at GUT contact use Zulip every day to communicate with their team leads. “Most of our agents are in their 60s or 70s, so the software must be as simple as possible. That’s why we love Zulip,” says Erik Dittert, who’s been leading GUT contact’s IT team for the past 20 years.
I would recommend doing a little training/handholding call/video when moving over a community -- but this is true for any new app.
My mom needed training to do basic things in Squarespace, and I had a friend who worked at Slack whose manager started every chat message with "Hi <name>" and ended it with a signature, like you would an email. :)
I'm going to be very honest here. The jock ain't watching no video. Dude has (possibly) early CTE. Do you think he has the attention span to sit through a two minute video? For a messaging app??
That's an automatic fail.
First, quarterbacks are not typically the concerning position with respect to CTE. Second, because he plays football he doesn't have a 2-minute attention span? "Dumb jock" is about as accurate as "ignorant HN poster". Third, he either spent 2 minutes learning how to use discord, or stumbled through it long enough to learn, why can't he do the same thing with Zulip? Would it help if they chopped it into a dozen TicToks?
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Tbf, Discord takes way more than 2 minutes to understand.
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> start on desktop
Echoing this. Navigation is better and clearer on desktop. The mobile apps works really well once you know what you're doing. Part of onboarding into Zulip is being able to get an "overview" of the community and the discussions that are currently happening, and this is easier on desktop.
In my experience, the median user for communication apps is mobile _only_. Before that, it better be a website that works well on phones, and decently on desktop.
As a developer I don't like it, but reality doesn't have to appease me.
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I use it for a non-it non-engineer group and everyone is happy with browser experience.
The mobile app is worse as it only allows writing in a few views that are not easy to access, and is becoming slower over time.
Data point of one: in my small community group that has moved to Zulip we do have a grandma contributing. No jocks though so I can't speak to that.
I would also like to note that Slack did not pass the grandma test in our case. I highly doubt that Discord would given how hyperactive the UI is.
As a software engineer who's had to interact with Discord only a handful of times, I had no idea when other people could hear me or where I had to click to find people I was looking for.
I've only rarely used it for voice, so I think I'm not in the right demographic. But I find its text/chat UI janky as hell.