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Yea, you hit the nail on the head. Mumble is super functional, but ui/ux is tough to chew. Engagement is so interesting to me. The notion that an app can be fu

by _n_b 6y ago

Yea, you hit the nail on the head. Mumble is super functional, but ui/ux is tough to chew. Engagement is so interesting to me. The notion that an app can be functionally better but practically worse in a marketplace because it doesn't have enough psychological hooks to keep users engaged. What an interesting software development challenge to face.

mikepurvis 6y ago
Agree! As an interesting counterexample to the trend, see video conferencing platforms over the past year: despite contact lists, calendar integration, cross platform whatever and decades of brand recognition, it wasn't Meet and Skype that got all the initial mindshare around pandemic WFH video calling— it was relative newcomer Zoom, whose killer feature was that you could just click a link and be in the meeting. On the other hand, once Meet finally ripped off that feature, I basically switched to using it all the time. So maybe Zoom's ease-of-entry was an initial winner, but ultimately there was nothing keeping me there when Google offered the same but without the freemium time limits. Perhaps there is a parallel here with a service like Mumble?
- Macha 6y ago
  Meet had that feature long before the pandemic? Certainly was using it when it was just branded "Hangouts" (no relation to the end user Hangouts) in like 2018. Google's loss was that they had pushed Meet (formerly Hangouts Meet, formerly "Hangouts, no the other Hangouts") as a business only thing while they were pushing Allo/Duo as the consumer apps and chasing the whatsapp/imessage market that year because of their addiction to launching a new chat app every year. (Hangouts anecdote: In the early days, hangouts.google.com went to the more well known hangouts for users app which had a contact list UI and a different video call interface. There was another link on the same domain to go to the meeting listing/creation screen now at meet.google.com. I don't think there was any way from one to the other in the UI, Google had a g.co/hangouts link to get to it and I think the unshortened URL just had an extra underscore component in the path. I guess they were still on the fence over whether to launch Meet as its own thing or as part of old Hangouts, before they decided to shut down old hangouts)
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    I had used Meet in a Gapps context pre-pandemic, and perhaps due to the confusion you describe was unable to create a meeting in my GMail account and get a link for people to click on to join— the closest I could do was send them a calendar invite, and that was unacceptable. Later on, it became possible to just go to meet.google.com and click "Start a Meeting".
    - Macha 6y ago
      Yeah, the interface with "Start A Meeting" was always there, but as far as I can tell, you had to know the special URL to bring it up - we found out about it on the google branded instructions on our hardware devices in the meeting room.

by _n_b 6y ago

mikepurvis 6y ago

Agree! As an interesting counterexample to the trend, see video conferencing platforms over the past year: despite contact lists, calendar integration, cross platform whatever and decades of brand recognition, it wasn't Meet and Skype that got all the initial mindshare around pandemic WFH video calling— it was relative newcomer Zoom, whose killer feature was that you could just click a link and be in the meeting. On the other hand, once Meet finally ripped off that feature, I basically switched to using it all the time. So maybe Zoom's ease-of-entry was an initial winner, but ultimately there was nothing keeping me there when Google offered the same but without the freemium time limits. Perhaps there is a parallel here with a service like Mumble?

Macha 6y ago
Meet had that feature long before the pandemic? Certainly was using it when it was just branded "Hangouts" (no relation to the end user Hangouts) in like 2018. Google's loss was that they had pushed Meet (formerly Hangouts Meet, formerly "Hangouts, no the other Hangouts") as a business only thing while they were pushing Allo/Duo as the consumer apps and chasing the whatsapp/imessage market that year because of their addiction to launching a new chat app every year. (Hangouts anecdote: In the early days, hangouts.google.com went to the more well known hangouts for users app which had a contact list UI and a different video call interface. There was another link on the same domain to go to the meeting listing/creation screen now at meet.google.com. I don't think there was any way from one to the other in the UI, Google had a g.co/hangouts link to get to it and I think the unshortened URL just had an extra underscore component in the path. I guess they were still on the fence over whether to launch Meet as its own thing or as part of old Hangouts, before they decided to shut down old hangouts)
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  I had used Meet in a Gapps context pre-pandemic, and perhaps due to the confusion you describe was unable to create a meeting in my GMail account and get a link for people to click on to join— the closest I could do was send them a calendar invite, and that was unacceptable. Later on, it became possible to just go to meet.google.com and click "Start a Meeting".
  - Macha 6y ago
    Yeah, the interface with "Start A Meeting" was always there, but as far as I can tell, you had to know the special URL to bring it up - we found out about it on the google branded instructions on our hardware devices in the meeting room.