14 ms·

I think the worst UI is simply the Teams one, because it presents as an app volume control but then simply controls the global device volume. Fuck off, you are

I think the worst UI is simply the Teams one, because it presents as an app volume control but then simply controls the global device volume. Fuck off, you are not the only app running. But that comes second to the microphone gain control, which Teams similarly exerts unilateral control over - only this time through an automated algorithm that for some microphone types just ends up muting them entirely. It's wild, you can go into the Windows gain control settings and see the slider wiggle around.

varenc 5y ago
I understand the motivation. A user might set an app's volume low and raise the system volume very high to compensate. But then audio from another program, likely Teams, might blow your ears out when it starts. In a vacuum, I like the idea, but given that the standard on Desktop is in-app volume control Teams' behavior sounds worse. In iOS I've never seen an in-app volume control (I assume its forbidden) and all volume adjustments affect the system volume.
- reificator 5y ago
  > In iOS I never seen an in-app volume control (I assume its forbidden) and all volume adjustments affect the system volume. Typically games will have them so you can balance out music and interface sounds relative to in-game sounds. In my opinion a volume mixer is a requirement for a decent user experience. To reuse the game example: if I want to listen to a podcast while playing, I'd better be able to hear the podcast clearly while also hearing the important sounds from the game.
  - _carbyau_ 5y ago
    Gaming with friends online. 1. Upon first open of the game, turn the music volume to off or 10%. 2. Make any other game noise 30% max. 3. Enjoy being able to play and hear game, while also being able to hear friends on Mumble at reasonable volume.
  - HelixEndeavor 5y ago
    I will say I find the inconsistency in whether a game will obey the physical Silent switch on iOS to be annoying at times. I'll know I have my volume turned up but oh, this game is being silent because Silent is on. At the very least that should be an option. While I'm on the Silent gripe, mild tangent, but Facebook on Android refusing to follow the Notifications volume and instead following the Ringtone volume is one of the shittiest pieces of UX I have to deal with daily.
    - dannyw 5y ago
      I'm confident it's intentional at this point - they probably A/B tested alternatives and realised this gives them the highest engagement.
      - HelixEndeavor 5y ago
        Oh, it's painfully obvious that it's intentional, and that's what makes it truly infuriating. I can tolerate a genuine mistake from a developer, no biggie, we're all human, yadda yadda, I *cannot* tolerate Zuckerborg condescendingly ignoring my own decisions and autonomy with my device and asserting that his stupid app is more important than anything else in my life at any given moment.
- toss1 5y ago
  Seems that, since the right volume to adjust is dependent on so many contextual variables, the right thing to do is to display two sliders, one for app & one for the system volume, and let the user adjust the appropriate one.
- wly_cdgr 5y ago
  Cap every app's local volume setting at lowest in use by any app & only allow user to raise volume above this threshold explicitly for currently focused app
mianos 5y ago
Teams is the reference for bad UI. Paste a code block. Select a word in the code block. Copy and you get the whole block copied not the selected word. I could write a page of the issues like this. Maybe it would not be so bad if you only used Teams but when you use slack at the same time it is like someone is wacking you in the back of the head every few minutes.
- hnick 5y ago
  We had network issues the other day and a few minutes into the meeting we realised my audio stream was delayed by a whole minute. There was no indication on the Teams UI this was happening. I'd hear a question about a window I'd already closed on screen share, type a response, and they got it a minute after asking. As someone who uses Discord at home, Teams is pain.
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    LOL. I wonder where that data was physically sitting for a whole minute.
    - CamperBob2 5y ago
      Paging Animats... Animats to the HN courtesy desk...
    - hnick 5y ago
      I don't really know how these things work but it was quite crisp while my outgoing was very choppy so I hung up the mic and resorted to typing. I was assuming a lot of packet loss and it was rebuilding a little behind the times, the network was very slow that day in general but the voices were clear.
      - frxx 5y ago
        You can check your packet loss in the call health info I think.
    - 5y ago
spoonjim 5y ago
What I find perplexingly awesome about how terrible Teams is is the fact that now people don’t keep bothering me all day with useless messages. The software is so terrible that like a gas station bathroom you just get in, do what you need to, and get out.
- malshe 5y ago
  OMG, this is so damn accurate! Thanks for that gas station analogy!
duxup 5y ago
I just don't think there's a good answer. Audio settings in every app is it's own source of frustration for me. I pretty much test them each time I join a different conferencing or audio related app...
neilpanchal 5y ago
But wait! there's more (Google Meet and Microsoft Teams): https://neil.computer/notes/oh-sorry-i-was-on-mute/ https://neil.computer/notes/oh-sorry-i-was-on-mute/
bookaway 5y ago
Teams, Google Meet, Webex, Zoom -- on Chromium, they all hijack and increase your microphone volume without you knowing. It's infuriating. Just thinking about it pisses me off. You have to have the volume control open and have a live tug-of-war with the app while you're talking. Firefox, either intentionally or unintentionally, does not let Meet do this. I say Meet, because none of the others work on Firefox anyway. But the recent Meet update is broken on Firefox, so yeah, there goes that.
- nullify88 5y ago
  Krisp, a noise cancelling application, is able to lock the microphone levels. I believe this works even without it on / without the trial timer counting down. But yes, going to that kinda length to prevent those applications from messing with the gain control is absurd
- cycomanic 5y ago
  Zoom works without problems on Firefox here (Linux). The browser version tends to be much better than the app, which crashes for me consistently.
- yoz-y 5y ago
  Skype has a checkbox to stop it from doing that, but then ignores the setting and does it anyway. Ruined a few podcast recordings for me.
k12sosse 5y ago
What's your uservoice suggestion URL? Will vote for it.
iambateman 5y ago
Just in case an MS engineer is reading these Teams gripes… On Mac, Teams does not honor system-level Do not Disturb. So when I turn off notifications during a presentation at work and my friend sends me snarky comments about our boss…
- mortenjorck 5y ago
  Teams’ notifications on Mac are an ongoing debacle. Because they are Microsoft’s own implementation, rather than using the system API, not only do they not respect DND, they also helpfully get lost behind other notifications that come in from properly designed applications. According to the Microsoft admin updates I’m subscribed to, native notifications on Mac have been in a beta channel for months, with a full rollout pushed back repeatedly for no reason that I can discern.
  - HelixEndeavor 5y ago
    Developers stubbornly refusing to utilize the tools provided by the operating system because they think they can do it better (90% of the time they can't) is one of my greatest pet peeves. You should ONLY ever use your own engine for things like notifications if the particular OS doesn't support them (pre-10 Windows)
    - hackthememes 5y ago
      I believe that in this case it's simply convenience/laziness to have a single notifications codebase across both operating systems? That and Windows didn't have native notifications when it was first developed. Not that it excuses a big chat application from MS behaving this way, just saying that they probably didn't deliberately choose to re-implement notifications just because they didn't like the OS ones.
      - ygra 5y ago
        Some software also presents that in the settings as the choice between "native notifications, which don't have as many features" and "custom notifications, which have all bells and whistles". And the default of course is the one with more features, not the one that respects your settings. I think Mattermost was where I've seen that distinction.
eulgro 5y ago
Try to zoom any document, it zooms the whole app. I'm surprised it doesn't zoom the whole operating system honestly, or change my screen resolution.
- HelixEndeavor 5y ago
  Try to zoom a document and it zooms an image file of your entire hard drive.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Users can complain but they cannot switch. :) Why isnt Teams open source. Microsoft supports open source, blah, blah.
manmal 5y ago
I think Zoom does the same thing on macOS, or at least it did last year.
Lurkars 5y ago
Also nice that it controls playback of other apps. Intended as a nice feature: your listening to music, accept incoming call, music stops, hang up, music starts again. Sounds nice, in practise it starts randomly music during calls. Or you stopped music for hours, accepting a low level call and raise your volume,hang up and get blasted away by your loud music starting to play.
- maverwa 5y ago
  Or my favorite. Accepting a call, manually pausing music using media keys, call ends, I try to resume my music using media keys, resume Teams ringing sound instead. Thanks teams, I really wanted to here that tune again!
- bennyp101 5y ago
  Yea, if I have Spotify paused - having not listened to it all day - after a call it starts it playing again.
bserge 5y ago
It's OK, they're fixing it soon by having Teams be part of the OS :D
bostonsre 5y ago
Zoom does the same thing with my volume. Seems kind of an odd design choice that is pretty malware-y.
pfortuny 5y ago
Do you know Teams also adds white noise globally?
skinkestek 5y ago
The +4 people icon still gets me after a year as I click it to see who else is in the meeting. Luckily it doesn't do anything bad, it just does nothing.
teekert 5y ago
Yeah, also, sometimes my volume buttons are not controlling my headphone, the headphone that I'm using and is the only thing producing sound at that time. It takes some time but you'll learn that you need to set the sound output differently in the Windows taskbar itself. And then later of course, you need to set it back because you don't want all sound to go through the headset you just wear while in a meeting and put down as soon as you end a call...
nothis 5y ago
Microsoft‘s UX incompetence to market dominance ratio continues to baffle me. I’ve pretty much settled on blaming this on MS winning some race to first OS/Office software useable enough for mass adoption and just forcing all the rest since. If you think of productivity hours destroyed because of Excel quirks and Windows rebooting at the worst possible time, this is maybe the most damage a monopoly has ever done to the economy. But the people who had the power to stop this probably use Word and own Microsoft stock. We’re stuck.
watwut 5y ago
Microsoft Teams UI is so bad in so many different ways. And in worst way possible - where it works enough for management to not ditch it, but doing something ridiculous on every occasion.
alfredbez 5y ago
OT: We used MS Teams and Slack and management recently decided to close our Slack workspace and switch to MS Teams. Most of our devs are unhappy with Teams so we switched to a selfhosted zulip instance and we're very happy with that.
aasasd 5y ago
Alas Teams is far from the only app to control the global volume, and it doesn't happen only in Windows.
- aasasd 5y ago
  BTW, the most ridiculous instance of this that I've met is when a game fiddled with the OS-global volume when I adjusted the volume in the game's options.
gambiting 5y ago
I literally had to install a virtual microphone device with a fake driver and make teams use that - otherwise it would keep adjusting my real microphone gain despite it being perfectly fine. The virtual microphone cannot have the level adjusted at all, so teams can't do anything, but it's just SO STUPID. Just have an option to either auto-adjust or not, don't force it on everybody.
tclancy 5y ago
Oh, it could be much worse. You could be using Teams on OSX. Nothing behaves properly. I've spent at least a day of work time trying to get rid of the hidden window for notifications which prevents keyboard focus from ever working.

varenc 5y ago

I understand the motivation. A user might set an app's volume low and raise the system volume very high to compensate. But then audio from another program, likely Teams, might blow your ears out when it starts. In a vacuum, I like the idea, but given that the standard on Desktop is in-app volume control Teams' behavior sounds worse. In iOS I've never seen an in-app volume control (I assume its forbidden) and all volume adjustments affect the system volume.

reificator 5y ago
> In iOS I never seen an in-app volume control (I assume its forbidden) and all volume adjustments affect the system volume. Typically games will have them so you can balance out music and interface sounds relative to in-game sounds. In my opinion a volume mixer is a requirement for a decent user experience. To reuse the game example: if I want to listen to a podcast while playing, I'd better be able to hear the podcast clearly while also hearing the important sounds from the game.
- _carbyau_ 5y ago
  Gaming with friends online. 1. Upon first open of the game, turn the music volume to off or 10%. 2. Make any other game noise 30% max. 3. Enjoy being able to play and hear game, while also being able to hear friends on Mumble at reasonable volume.
- HelixEndeavor 5y ago
  I will say I find the inconsistency in whether a game will obey the physical Silent switch on iOS to be annoying at times. I'll know I have my volume turned up but oh, this game is being silent because Silent is on. At the very least that should be an option. While I'm on the Silent gripe, mild tangent, but Facebook on Android refusing to follow the Notifications volume and instead following the Ringtone volume is one of the shittiest pieces of UX I have to deal with daily.
  - dannyw 5y ago
    I'm confident it's intentional at this point - they probably A/B tested alternatives and realised this gives them the highest engagement.
    - HelixEndeavor 5y ago
      Oh, it's painfully obvious that it's intentional, and that's what makes it truly infuriating. I can tolerate a genuine mistake from a developer, no biggie, we're all human, yadda yadda, I *cannot* tolerate Zuckerborg condescendingly ignoring my own decisions and autonomy with my device and asserting that his stupid app is more important than anything else in my life at any given moment.
toss1 5y ago
Seems that, since the right volume to adjust is dependent on so many contextual variables, the right thing to do is to display two sliders, one for app & one for the system volume, and let the user adjust the appropriate one.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Cap every app's local volume setting at lowest in use by any app & only allow user to raise volume above this threshold explicitly for currently focused app

mianos 5y ago

Teams is the reference for bad UI. Paste a code block. Select a word in the code block. Copy and you get the whole block copied not the selected word. I could write a page of the issues like this. Maybe it would not be so bad if you only used Teams but when you use slack at the same time it is like someone is wacking you in the back of the head every few minutes.

hnick 5y ago
We had network issues the other day and a few minutes into the meeting we realised my audio stream was delayed by a whole minute. There was no indication on the Teams UI this was happening. I'd hear a question about a window I'd already closed on screen share, type a response, and they got it a minute after asking. As someone who uses Discord at home, Teams is pain.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  LOL. I wonder where that data was physically sitting for a whole minute.
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    Paging Animats... Animats to the HN courtesy desk...
  - hnick 5y ago
    I don't really know how these things work but it was quite crisp while my outgoing was very choppy so I hung up the mic and resorted to typing. I was assuming a lot of packet loss and it was rebuilding a little behind the times, the network was very slow that day in general but the voices were clear.
    - frxx 5y ago
      You can check your packet loss in the call health info I think.
  - 5y ago

spoonjim 5y ago

What I find perplexingly awesome about how terrible Teams is is the fact that now people don’t keep bothering me all day with useless messages. The software is so terrible that like a gas station bathroom you just get in, do what you need to, and get out.

malshe 5y ago
OMG, this is so damn accurate! Thanks for that gas station analogy!

duxup 5y ago

I just don't think there's a good answer. Audio settings in every app is it's own source of frustration for me. I pretty much test them each time I join a different conferencing or audio related app...

neilpanchal 5y ago

But wait! there's more (Google Meet and Microsoft Teams): https://neil.computer/notes/oh-sorry-i-was-on-mute/ https://neil.computer/notes/oh-sorry-i-was-on-mute/

bookaway 5y ago

Teams, Google Meet, Webex, Zoom -- on Chromium, they all hijack and increase your microphone volume without you knowing. It's infuriating. Just thinking about it pisses me off. You have to have the volume control open and have a live tug-of-war with the app while you're talking. Firefox, either intentionally or unintentionally, does not let Meet do this. I say Meet, because none of the others work on Firefox anyway. But the recent Meet update is broken on Firefox, so yeah, there goes that.

nullify88 5y ago
Krisp, a noise cancelling application, is able to lock the microphone levels. I believe this works even without it on / without the trial timer counting down. But yes, going to that kinda length to prevent those applications from messing with the gain control is absurd
cycomanic 5y ago
Zoom works without problems on Firefox here (Linux). The browser version tends to be much better than the app, which crashes for me consistently.
yoz-y 5y ago
Skype has a checkbox to stop it from doing that, but then ignores the setting and does it anyway. Ruined a few podcast recordings for me.

k12sosse 5y ago

What's your uservoice suggestion URL? Will vote for it.

iambateman 5y ago

Just in case an MS engineer is reading these Teams gripes… On Mac, Teams does not honor system-level Do not Disturb. So when I turn off notifications during a presentation at work and my friend sends me snarky comments about our boss…

mortenjorck 5y ago
Teams’ notifications on Mac are an ongoing debacle. Because they are Microsoft’s own implementation, rather than using the system API, not only do they not respect DND, they also helpfully get lost behind other notifications that come in from properly designed applications. According to the Microsoft admin updates I’m subscribed to, native notifications on Mac have been in a beta channel for months, with a full rollout pushed back repeatedly for no reason that I can discern.
- HelixEndeavor 5y ago
  Developers stubbornly refusing to utilize the tools provided by the operating system because they think they can do it better (90% of the time they can't) is one of my greatest pet peeves. You should ONLY ever use your own engine for things like notifications if the particular OS doesn't support them (pre-10 Windows)
  - hackthememes 5y ago
    I believe that in this case it's simply convenience/laziness to have a single notifications codebase across both operating systems? That and Windows didn't have native notifications when it was first developed. Not that it excuses a big chat application from MS behaving this way, just saying that they probably didn't deliberately choose to re-implement notifications just because they didn't like the OS ones.
    - ygra 5y ago
      Some software also presents that in the settings as the choice between "native notifications, which don't have as many features" and "custom notifications, which have all bells and whistles". And the default of course is the one with more features, not the one that respects your settings. I think Mattermost was where I've seen that distinction.

eulgro 5y ago

Try to zoom any document, it zooms the whole app. I'm surprised it doesn't zoom the whole operating system honestly, or change my screen resolution.

HelixEndeavor 5y ago
Try to zoom a document and it zooms an image file of your entire hard drive.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Users can complain but they cannot switch. :) Why isnt Teams open source. Microsoft supports open source, blah, blah.

manmal 5y ago

I think Zoom does the same thing on macOS, or at least it did last year.

Lurkars 5y ago

Also nice that it controls playback of other apps. Intended as a nice feature: your listening to music, accept incoming call, music stops, hang up, music starts again. Sounds nice, in practise it starts randomly music during calls. Or you stopped music for hours, accepting a low level call and raise your volume,hang up and get blasted away by your loud music starting to play.

maverwa 5y ago
Or my favorite. Accepting a call, manually pausing music using media keys, call ends, I try to resume my music using media keys, resume Teams ringing sound instead. Thanks teams, I really wanted to here that tune again!
bennyp101 5y ago
Yea, if I have Spotify paused - having not listened to it all day - after a call it starts it playing again.

bserge 5y ago

It's OK, they're fixing it soon by having Teams be part of the OS :D

bostonsre 5y ago

Zoom does the same thing with my volume. Seems kind of an odd design choice that is pretty malware-y.

pfortuny 5y ago

Do you know Teams also adds white noise globally?

skinkestek 5y ago

The +4 people icon still gets me after a year as I click it to see who else is in the meeting. Luckily it doesn't do anything bad, it just does nothing.

teekert 5y ago

Yeah, also, sometimes my volume buttons are not controlling my headphone, the headphone that I'm using and is the only thing producing sound at that time. It takes some time but you'll learn that you need to set the sound output differently in the Windows taskbar itself. And then later of course, you need to set it back because you don't want all sound to go through the headset you just wear while in a meeting and put down as soon as you end a call...

nothis 5y ago

Microsoft‘s UX incompetence to market dominance ratio continues to baffle me. I’ve pretty much settled on blaming this on MS winning some race to first OS/Office software useable enough for mass adoption and just forcing all the rest since. If you think of productivity hours destroyed because of Excel quirks and Windows rebooting at the worst possible time, this is maybe the most damage a monopoly has ever done to the economy. But the people who had the power to stop this probably use Word and own Microsoft stock. We’re stuck.

watwut 5y ago

Microsoft Teams UI is so bad in so many different ways. And in worst way possible - where it works enough for management to not ditch it, but doing something ridiculous on every occasion.

alfredbez 5y ago

OT: We used MS Teams and Slack and management recently decided to close our Slack workspace and switch to MS Teams. Most of our devs are unhappy with Teams so we switched to a selfhosted zulip instance and we're very happy with that.

aasasd 5y ago

Alas Teams is far from the only app to control the global volume, and it doesn't happen only in Windows.

aasasd 5y ago
BTW, the most ridiculous instance of this that I've met is when a game fiddled with the OS-global volume when I adjusted the volume in the game's options.

gambiting 5y ago

I literally had to install a virtual microphone device with a fake driver and make teams use that - otherwise it would keep adjusting my real microphone gain despite it being perfectly fine. The virtual microphone cannot have the level adjusted at all, so teams can't do anything, but it's just SO STUPID. Just have an option to either auto-adjust or not, don't force it on everybody.

tclancy 5y ago

Oh, it could be much worse. You could be using Teams on OSX. Nothing behaves properly. I've spent at least a day of work time trying to get rid of the hidden window for notifications which prevents keyboard focus from ever working.