What is your favorite thing about what Stride is promising to do for your team?

StrideGuns
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 14, 2017

Hi, I'm the Group Product Manager of the Stride team. We're excited to reveal Stride to the world last week and at the Atlassian Summit. (Check out stride.com and the product keynote - https://youtu.be/-Cd1w64-fcA). We've worked really hard to build sth that took a lot of your feedback into account (so sorry for the radio silence over the last few months, I hope now you understand...). 

Please tell us how Stride could solve the problems your team has today over and above HipChat - what could you do with Messaging, Meetings and Collaboration tools rolled into one? Does that make you excited? Or not.

Sound off.....

4 comments

Emil Gallant October 25, 2017

Our team is small, about 25 people and we've got about a dozen rooms setup.  We've been evaluating Stride for 2-3 weeks.

 

The initial releases of Stride (Windows and Linux clients) are missing critical features that prevent us from considering it seriously. 

 

Where is the search?  This is absolutely critical for us.  HipChat's search was already so poorly executed (and never fixed) that I assumed you'd improve that in Stride.  As far as we can see, you're only searching the names of rooms and people.

 

You're pushing the video meetings hard but you instead focused on displaying the technical stream stats for each participant but you have no way of displaying even a modest number of participants in anything but a filmstrip view.  Group chats needs a Brady Bunch-style grid display to be useful.  Think about how people actually conduct video meetings; it's usually one person addressing a group.

 

You also forgot to the add the ability to re-order the lists of Rooms and People.  Our users frequently group things together based on arbitrary factors.

 

The lists of people and rooms waste tons of space with padding all around the list items.  Once you've got more than just a handful of items, the list scrolls and scrolls.

 

The native Windows client uses some funky Windows controls.  You should just use the native display libraries.  Windows users don't care (or know) how other operating systems work so all you're doing is confusing people looking for the location of the menus.  Same thing when you're changing the default color of the window title space.  It makes it confusing to determine which window you want to activate because it uses a non-standard color.  It's bad UI.

 

Speaking of the UI... in the Windows client you are reserving approximately 35% of the display area for non-chat items.  If the philosophy behind Stride is to aid in communication, you should let the client be configured to focus on the actual communication.

 

Actions and decisions are another new feature that don't really make a lot of sense.  Are they linked to any external tools like Jira or do they only live in Stride?  And why is the action to view past events hidden behind an icon that's labeled Highlights?  Highlights of what?

 

Where are the appearance settings?  HipChat at least offered a modest list of settings you could change to make the client more customized for your preferences.

 

Another missing feature that you promote heavily is the Focus mode.  That icon is totally missing from the Windows client, it's replaced with a gear icon that leads you to your profile settings.

Richard Lamb November 10, 2017

Agree about search, absolutely critical. Came here looking for info on search after quickly evaluating Stride. Won't be coming back anytime soon.

 

"Please tell us how Stride could solve the problems your team has today over and above HipChat - what could you do with Messaging, Meetings and Collaboration tools rolled into one? Does that make you excited? Or not.

Sound off....."

 

Sounding off into the void probably.

Christian Illy November 13, 2017

Emil has some pretty good points here and I would be glad to see such stuff adressed in a reply by someone from the Stride team :)

alexlwilson February 15, 2018

 

When Stride was announced I was super excited that it would get us off of Slack and offer a rich integration with JIRA. However, I was and still am disappointed to see that it still can't compete with Slack and in terms of functionality may not even be better than Hipchat.

We would love to see Stride become our go to messaging application. Primarily because we believe as an Atlassian application that it should help interact and talk about work in JIRA and Confluence. Some of the other features like decisions are appealing because people often forget to document them because it isn't convenient.

We used Hipchat for maybe a month years ago, and just weren't that impressed when compared to Slack, which just has a more feature rich experience.

For us to move to Stride, it must have rich integrations with all your major products. Just pushing updates doesn't count, when there are Slack integrations coming out that allow for actions to be taken on issues in JIRA on cloud and server. Stride doesn't even offer a server integration yet. 

I hope your team is taking a serious look at how you can leverage Atlassian's large JIRA and Bitbucket user bases by offering integrations that your competitors can't. What I see today are the same integrations that everyone else has with nothing else that justifies switching.

Nate Chu February 26, 2018

We have been forcibly migrated to Stride, and it's been a very poor experience.   I spent 90 minutes converting the .deb package to something our team can use (RPM), and then logging in, I can only see downsides so far.  We have no desire or need for audio or video communication through this tool.  We used HipChat because it was useful and did one thing well.  Now it seems that Stride is doing the one thing more poorly, and adds a bunch of other junk that we have no intention or desire to use. 

 

The biggest issue I've seen so far (in 20 minutes of use) is that Rooms and Individuals are no longer distinct;  I want to see the chat rooms at the top, and individuals listed below that, as they have different functions.  Grouping everything together just creates confusion and makes it more difficult to evaluate with a glance.

 

A smaller issue is that I don't need another window polluting my desktop;  I already have way to many.  I previous had my browser window on one screen, and could see the count of notifications in the tab title.  Now I have to search through my window list, which is much more extensive.

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