I've spent a bit of time last year trying to convey my product instincts to the Zulip team and mostly stopped because I felt like they didn't care enough / weren't moving very fast. The basic problem is that the mobile app is, like it or not, the way most people will use the product, and it needs to be designed by an opinionated person who actually will say no to things.

In my view, the home page should be just like a proper messaging app: show every recent thread ("topic" in Zulip nomenclature) that I'm involved in, across all my channels, with unread ones indicated using a 'dot'. Or, if you really want to be like Slack, just copy Slack more directly. In either case, the other views (Inbox, Combined Feed, DMs, etc) should be under menus, not primary actions.

The other thing is that it's often hard to figure out how to reply to a topic. In the Combined Feed, which is my preferred view for consuming updates, the UX for replying sucks -- first you have to figure out to tap the headers; and even then, you can accidentally tap into a channel instead of a topic. It's extremely non obvious when you've done this and constantly causes people to reply in the wrong topic.

I vibecoded some improved Inbox UX using Claude Code and I think it would be a big step up, but it's hard to know what the steps would be to get it shipped, since I don't have time to spin up properly on the codebase and I doubt my changes are acceptable as-is. If Zulip team wants them I'd happily share though.

there are just so many issues, where do i start? its just apparent no designer or usability person ever used it or was involved in anything for this project. there is a weird search button with uncentered icon, scrolling makes some tooltip flicker and partially scroll on top of the header, the content of the page reappears on the top of the header when scrolling past it. everything just feels like one giant glitch. and when you scroll, there is a focus outline around whatever item you happened to drag the scroll area with. This is what i encountered in 5 seconds testing just opening and scrolling up and down.

My perspective:

I have looked at the rust Zulip forums, which are bulky. But with moderation and rules and having people on the autistic spectrum [citation needed], it perhaps is usable for large organizations. Just kidding.

We are using Zulip for 300+ members in a makerspace, and at 40 members, we were not happy. Scaling to 300 never broke not being happy, since we all hate the UI ever since.

I cannot re-open Zulip threads, which are also issues with an atomic "solved/unresolved" state, unless I have elevated access. It is not a true forum like PHP forums, where we ask people to name threads, and you might just skip reading more than the title, or locate interesting threads by activity and find stickies about important announcements in a pull, not push, way of doing things.

It instead is a chat where a thousand group chats are open, and no once wants to read any of them.

If they wanted to re-invent forums, they should have cloned the "discourse" web app/forum. Still looks like shit on every platform, mobile or desktop, but at least does not break down on mobile.