> getting people to use even the first layer of threads is very difficult, especially non-technical people
Indeed. We use Google Chat which is roughly a Slack clone in terms of structure. A discussion will start at the root level, and then branch into a thread after a few comments, but some users will miss this and continue to use the root level, which of course gets mixed into unrelated comments. It’s easy to create a mess, and it’s even worse when a discussion has multiple threads.
This “thread-based” style of space/channel was forced upon Google Chat users late last year. Prior to that, we had the option of “topic-based” channels, where every discussion had its own thread and there was no root level. Any reply to a topic would bump the topic into view. These were great for some use cases (one topic for each software issue, one topic for each support case, etc), and were easy to understand for non-technical people, because you could explain it like “each topic is like an email chain”. We got into the habit of summarizing the first comment of each topic, which always remained visible, so you could browse the list of discussions, again, much like email.
Anything that you can relate to email is great for the non-tech crowd.
Indeed. We use Google Chat which is roughly a Slack clone in terms of structure. A discussion will start at the root level, and then branch into a thread after a few comments, but some users will miss this and continue to use the root level, which of course gets mixed into unrelated comments. It’s easy to create a mess, and it’s even worse when a discussion has multiple threads.
This “thread-based” style of space/channel was forced upon Google Chat users late last year. Prior to that, we had the option of “topic-based” channels, where every discussion had its own thread and there was no root level. Any reply to a topic would bump the topic into view. These were great for some use cases (one topic for each software issue, one topic for each support case, etc), and were easy to understand for non-technical people, because you could explain it like “each topic is like an email chain”. We got into the habit of summarizing the first comment of each topic, which always remained visible, so you could browse the list of discussions, again, much like email.
Anything that you can relate to email is great for the non-tech crowd.