Hipchat may soon have the features all my other tools have had for years. In the meantime, it does some other things poorly.

The interface is designed such that it is work to do anything other than talk to the person I am already talking to. It seems like my use case is not considered (number of contacts/rooms, number of people in my org not already in my list, etc)

I cannot organize my list of contacts other than adhoc (no alphabet? no groups?). Finding a new contact involves moving my hand to the mouse, scrolling to the top of the left-hand pane, clicking on a header that doesn't seem to indicate anything but is the key to revealing the search bar I want... It's clunky and unintuitive.

The embedded youtube feature fails more often than it works and I'd really just like to turn it off. I used to click links and open them in browsers, where I expect websites to open, but now even if I remember to right-click instead of clicking, I still have to do more clicks to open a link than I used to.

I am disappointed by the half-functional nature of this feature, but more disappointed when I think software is losing its direction. Is this a chat program or a series of weak solutions to a bunch of problems I don't have?

Notifications other than the popup don't contain much information. For example, I am in a chat room and someone sends an @here message. I have a blue number 23 which shows that 23 messages have been sent since I last looked, and at least one of them had my name or @here tagged. Now, I want to make sure I didn't miss something someone sent to me in particular. Only way to find out which message triggered which alerts is to scroll a bunch and look. If you are logged in to one chat room, hanging out with 5 people casually, it's probably not an issue, but when I come back from a meeting and there are 7 rooms with large blue numbers in them... I have to do a lot of silly work to find out if I missed anything important.