14 ms·

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

• 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.
    • aoms 5y ago
      At Rest.....
• srswtf123 5y ago
  Ever used Lotus Notes? http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/lotus.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/lotus.htm
  • xarope 5y ago
    as an ex-IBMer, tragically yes...
  • etaioinshrdlu 5y ago
    The "Enter Password" at the bottom of that page is simply great.
    • sam_bristow 5y ago
      I seem to recall the password was client-side too. So if you had Lotus Notes in a VM and you restored from a save point you needed to remember what your password was when you did the save.
    • namdnay 5y ago
      So without defending Lotus Notes in any way, there was a meaning to the symbols: they were defined by some oneway function from what you were typing. So you would get used to the little symbol dance, and know if and when you’d mistyped
      • ptx 5y ago
        Wouldn't it also allow any onlookers, if they are able to memorize the symbol dance, to derive your password one character at a time by trial and error?
        • namdnay 5y ago
          No because it also depended on your computer . I remember when you switched computers it would change
  • Afforess 5y ago
• ncann 5y ago
  Yeah, Teams is notoriously bad for software engineering related messages. It wastes a shit ton of horizontal space and every code block/log snippet that you send is horribly displayed with big font and scrollbars. Of all the things compared to Slack this infuriates me the most.
• audiometry 5y ago
  stupid teams chat doesn't even have a 'reply with quote' but yeah, it's got lots of edgy emoticons and gifs.... stupid.
  • abakker 5y ago
    Amazingly, the mobile app version does!
    • pindab0ter 5y ago
      Because why would your app have consistent functionality for such basic features between web/desktop versions and mobile!
    • alpaca128 5y ago
      Consistency, the one weakness of MS. Like when their own official OneNote app for Windows Phone 8 had fewer features than the Android version.
  • _n_b_ 5y ago
    > stupid teams chat doesn't even have a 'reply with quote' Don’t worry guys, it’s on the roadmap for this month! https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?featureid=81113 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?featur... Next maybe we can fix issue where if you have the iOS app, you randomly appear available for hours?
• gitgud 5y ago
  One thing that always bugged me in MS Teams is that when you do the shortcut for :thumbs-up it always presents 20 thumbs-down emojis first instead (due to alphabetical order)... but people are way more likely to use thumbs-up! Why not put that first!!! A small thing, but one that would annoy me almost every day...
  • vladvasiliu 5y ago
    This reminds of something that aggravates me to no end and cannot turn off: emoticons / emojis. I never use those but it keeps offering those by switching typing focus to the popup. The issue comes from my main language being French. And in French, for some reason, there has to be a space between the word and the colon. But in Teams, and even Outlook Web, whenever I put a space and colon to introduce a list on the line below, so I type <space><colon><enter>, I end up with a freakin' smiley, so I have to go back, delete it, and put a colon in again.
    • nescioquid 5y ago
      This floored me: when the app decides you typed an emoji, you can undo (ctrl+z) to get back to what you actually typed. That never would have occurred to me to try, simply because the mental model I have of "undo" pertains to things I did, not the app.
• koyote 5y ago
  > Paste a code block. Select a word in the code block. Copy and you get the whole block copied not the selected word. I feel like this used to work properly until a month or so ago. The worst bug I've seen, and this is also something that only started happening in the last several months, is select messages simply not appearing! So basically I open my computer in the morning and look at Teams and it'll have messages from overnight. EXCEPT some messages did not make it, like, at all. There was a whole thread that had replies that were simply not visible to me. I even replied to that thread and on my screen the reply appeared right after the last visible message whereas for everyone else it appeared after the 40 or so messages that came in overnight. I haven't been the only one to run into that issue either. Restarting Teams is the only thing that brought the messages back. Now that's what I call a critical bug! Who knows how many things I've missed.
  • iamhamm 5y ago
    Mine is doing a variation of this now. If I’m on a call, messages stop coming through but I’ll see them on my mobile. When I end the call, they still don’t come in until I restart the app!
  • phreack 5y ago
    I've had that happen on Slack mobile so much I just don't trust it anymore. I always tell people (even if it seems counterintuitive) to email me when things are urgent because very rarely (or not, since I can't tell), it's decided not to show me critical messages.
    • ljm 5y ago
      I get that a lot. A DM arrives, there's a red blob with a number next to the sender's name, but the actual message doesn't appear.
      • r1ch 5y ago
        Everyone I've talked with has experienced this, yet it's been a bug for years. I don't understand. Do Slack not use their own product?!
• Beldin 5y ago
  I was grading an online exam yesterday. You're lucky. This program used an SPA. The core workflow is hidden and split over multiple "tabs". Tabs include: question, given answer, score awarded. That's right, none of those are available simultaneously. Yes, 70% of its window goes unused when full-screen. Going through all students can be done in (at least) two ways. In the first, you can press a button to proceed to the next student, but you cannot go back a student. In the other, you click "save" after grading each answer. This returns you to the overview of students. The overview displays 20 students per 'page' (tiny font, tiny rows), irrespective of your window size. There is no "next student" button, you have to click the student you want to grade. If you're grading past the first page (e.g., student #21): surprise! You're back on page 1. Clicking the student's tiny row requires more precision than you'll need the rest of your work week on modern desktops. I could go on. I will, actually. Apparently, standard workflow is you can never go back to an already graded answer and points awarded become final; I accidentally used a workflow that didn't have this idiocy). In short, there is no way this product's core functionality was tested. Any tester would have exclaimed "are you kidding me?!", and have walked out. Or inflict physical violence on their computer. Or whoever hired them. In short: setting this product on fire is the best reason for bringing back floppies in 25 years.
  • jhgb 5y ago
    If it's an SPA, can't it be greasemonkey'd to display things properly?
    • Beldin 5y ago
      I had a hiccup pressing a button once. Was kicked back to initial screen and the student was "locked" - which requires an admin to reset. So: maybe, but the back end is probably too flakey. Official recommendation is to use IE for grading and only one grader may be logged in at any time. Really, fire is too good for this mess.
    • yawaworht1978 5y ago
      Curious, how would you do that? Would it be a long script or is there some sort of mini Library for this?
• raxxorrax 5y ago
  I think the success of Teams was a surprise to MS. It was ingenious to copy slack and push it on enterprise users though.
  • Sanguinaire 5y ago
    It's no surprise, that was classic MS strategy. Sell the thing everyone actually needs (Office, because they smothered the competition), but bundle it with something sticky which will also hoover up data about your workers - no need for the product to be any good, execs in charge of purchasing won't have to suffer with it for a fraction of the time employees spend. Oh also, I happen to have $200k of Azure credits here for you - no pressure but if you do start using Azure we'll make the bill for all this productivity software go away...
    • skohan 5y ago
      I feel like this aligns with the cartoon of big tech in my head, which goes something like this: - Apple is the designer: I want to make everything beautiful and perfect. Sometimes that pesky messiness of reality gets in the way, but if that's the case, it's reality which should change. - Google is the engineer: Yeah cool this project sounds good, let's replace that old technology with this new thing that will be so much better! We'll release the prototype in a month, and six months from now we'll have the whole thing done. Hmmm 4 months later, some of those details that took years to refine in the old version are actually pretty tricky, and these weird users like actually want to keep them... Yeah details are hard, let's put this project on back burner because now I'm excited about new project! - Microsoft is the MBA: Products don't matter! They're just interchangeable widgets the grunts working below me have to concern themselves with. The important thing is what I can sell to upper management with my power-point presentation. We're data-driven, so as long as my KPI's improve, that means I have made the morally correct decision. If I can leverage or trick users into using the product the way I want, it means I'm good at my job!
• sam_bristow 5y ago
  Even worse than Teams is Teams on GovCloud.
• piokoch 5y ago
  My the most favorite one is when someone pastes link in a chat to MS Office document on Sharepoint/Onedrive. It is opened in Teams and when you close the document you might naively assume you will be back in the chat you came from but no, you end up on the main screen and you need to search for the chat window again.
  • culopatin 5y ago
    Which is impossible because it throws meetings with chats all in the same list so you have 3000 things going on. Not to mention that meetings that ended 3 weeks ago still have active chats. Or if you were invited once now you’re forever attached to the chat of all the meetings that come after, even if you’re not invited. Teams started ok, but it has become worse than Skype, which is something I didn’t think was possible. From the company that made MSN messenger it’s hard to believe they didn’t have any lessons learned
    • azalemeth 5y ago
      Ahh, but MSN messenger was not the best of all chat clients in its day either. I remember advertisement aplenty, spam, terrible "candy bar" UIs and a password reset system that basically let others steal your account easily. I think I used the official client maybe twice at an upper limit. Honestly, the best UI Microsoft ever invented were always those inside their video games. I still think AoE2 is hard to beat.
      • culopatin 5y ago
        I mean it was pretty cancerous but it was stable and simple to use. A list of your chats sorted by last activity. Towards the end you could even play games. Voice messages, gifs, etc. It was a free ms product from the early 2000s, in 20 years we should’ve gotten much further ahead, instead we went backwards
  • Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
    And don't even think about looking at the document and commenting something about it in the chat, and then looking again... because it seems impossible to have the document and the chat open at the same time. I tend to just ignore the links and download everything because of this.
• fomine3 5y ago
  Pro tip: don't press Ctrl before release mouse button This is annoying.
• deergomoo 5y ago
  We've been using Teams since the pandemic started and we switched to WFH. It started off awful, and in that time, it hasn't got better in any material way. Interactions still feel like your mouse pointer is moving through molasses. Notifications are misbehaved trash. Video calls make your CPU beg for mercy (useful if you want to fry eggs on your laptop though). Switching between multiple organisations is still miserable (although at least now you get notifications for other orgs instead of them just getting lost in the aether, never to be seen). The funny thing is, none of these problems exist on the mobile apps, which are actually quite well-behaved. I guess that's because they have to use system APIs.
  • pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    >It started off awful, and in that time, it hasn't got better in any material way.// That's not my experience at all. It's not great, but it has improved a lot. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-new-in-microsoft-teams-d7092a6d-c896-424c-b362-a472d5f105de https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-new-in-mic...
    • deergomoo 5y ago
      Perhaps saying it hasn't got any better was uncharitable—thinking back, when we first started using it I don't think you could even have more than four people visible on a call at the same time. But the basics—the things that I mentioned in my previous comment—have remained all but unaddressed for the lifetime of the product so far, and it's utterly miserable to use because of it. They're just piling new features on. I understand why, it's just frustrating.
• kvhdude 5y ago
  Anyone tried quoting a message in a reply in teams? For a messaging client, this should be the most important since everyone in the group wants to know which message you are replying to... But ofcourse msft has to screw it up.. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/quote-chat-message-in-reply-on-desktop/m-p/895883 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/quote...
  • mianos 5y ago
    "48,477 votes Reply to specific message in chat on desktop app" Now that is a quotable quote when it comes to being told something has a bad UI and choosing to do nothing about it.