
Ask HN: How would you improve collaboration tools? - programjoe
I&#x27;m looking to build a startup in this space since I&#x27;m genuinely interested. I&#x27;d love to learn what things people feel like are missing that would make work easier when working with other teammates (doesn&#x27;t have to be technical).
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PaulHoule
I think the #1 problem is too many tools.

For instance, I have collaborated with people using Skype, Discord, WebEx,
Slack, IRC, Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Lync, icq, AOL Instant Messenger,
Paltalk, Tivejo, Go To Meeting, etc.

People will tell you horror stories about all of those things, but I have
found them all to be adequate. Often people conflate problems with their audio
and network with problems in the tools. It also seems that these tools have
made little technical progress over the years, I mean, Facebook Messenger
doesn't seem very different from AOL Instant Messenger.

Having them all installed at once is a problem though because most of them
want to live in the tray and will cause slowdowns and distractions while
logging in. Today many of them are written with Electron and other cross-
platform toolkits that many think are bloated for apps they use all the time,
but it is insane to have five of them running in the tray.

Same is true for other kinds of collaboration tools, say case management/issue
tracking. For instance, a customer of my customer submits a trouble ticket to
my customer, I have my own ticket system (so I have visibility into my
workload, history, etc.) and then I find the problem is because of one of my
suppliers, so I have to make a ticket in their system. At least one of those
systems is going to have a system with a login procedure like

[https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=get+smart+intro&view=de...](https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=get+smart+intro&view=detail&mid=BA8581A61ABB5C69B7F9BA8581A61ABB5C69B7F9&FORM=VIRE)

and take 45 seconds to load the page for creating a ticket.

At some point people give up on having it work right and just accept the
problems. If you want to be a world-class remote, you can't do that.

~~~
tchaffee
I was going to make the same point. If there was a (preferably web based) chat
/ call / video conference app that allows me to connect to all of those
services and never have to keep context switching, it would be a big
improvement. Maybe there is one and I just don't know about it?

As far as issue tracking, unfortunately I think the functionality and workflow
differs too much between products for there to be one UI to rule them all.

There is actually one collaboration tool that has been able to work somewhat
well (not without cons) across all UI implementations: email. That might be
something to think about.

~~~
programjoe
That's really helpful to know, I had been considering building software geared
towards lean / iterative and auto generated documentation as my initial
approach into collaboration tools but I will definitely have to start
expanding my research

~~~
PaulHoule
Joe, send an email to paul.houle@ontology2.com. I am working on a tool which
is oriented towards auto generated documentation in the large. It is not
"consumer oriented" but more like "Project Xanadu for nerds", so you might
find components of it useful.

------
dasmoth
One thought is that a lot of the current/recent tools in this area focus of
_synchronous_ collaboration. And it's not clear to me that sending your
collaborators a regular stream of non-maskable interrupts is the best route to
great products or ideas. So how about some tools that promote _asynchronous_
collaboration?

Not 100% sure what the next stage is, though. I personally find e-mail a
pretty good medium for having a considered discussion -- but it doesn't seem
to work that way for everyone. Maybe an opportunity there?

