[alya]

Head of Product for Zulip here. I'd love to dig in deeper to understand what's confusing to non-technical folks as they are starting out, so that we can keep working to improve the product and documentation to address it. If anyone is up for a chat, please reach out by email at [e-mail], or in the #feedback stream in the Zulip development community (https://zulip.com/development-community/)!

[darkteflon]

Hello there, thanks for the offer, very much appreciated and characteristic of the Zulip community as a whole.

I actually did open and/or add to issues on GH, and actively participated in the development Zulip instance on the issues that came up for us as a team. I found the community to be very receptive.

I just want to reiterate, for anyone coming across this thread now or later, that Zulip really is a fantastic product and open source project. The main uphill battle for us was getting non-technical people to buy in to a paradigm of effectively “filing” their messages up front. That’s not some kind of problem with, or criticism of, Zulip as a product. For messages to be in correct context, the sender needs to _put_ them there. To want to do that, it helps if they buy in to the paradigm in the first place.

“Why do I have to do this?”

“Because it makes it possible for anyone to come along later and get the whole picture.”

“Okay, that’s worth a bit of friction up-front.”

It’s really a people thing - not a Zulip thing.

Just 2c from our little team.

Best of luck and thanks for all your great work. We’ll definitely be checking it out again soon.

[alya]

Thank you for elaborating and for the kind words!

[rkangel]

My view is that there is a UI issue here, but I can't come up with a suggestion of how to improve it.

People get their head around MS Teams very easily and fundamentally the only difference between Zulip and Teams is that you are required to put a title/subject on your thread in Zulip as supposed to Teams where it's optional.

In Teams the value of this is clear whereas in Zulip you need to understand the goal. I've always thought that with a bit of a step back UI adjustment to Zulip things could be clearer.