4 ms·

But... Zoom's UX is absolutely terrible Half the options that should be on a meeting-basis are buried deep into the user settings, only accessible from the web

But... Zoom's UX is absolutely terrible Half the options that should be on a meeting-basis are buried deep into the user settings, only accessible from the web interface, and they have confusing names and meanings. I've used lots of softwares, Zoom might be one of the worst when it comes to UX.

aidos 4y ago
It’s horrible. Especially if you’re doing screen sharing / scribbling on screens all day. “The zoom dance” is my term for people constantly pushing those stupid little floating windows about. We switched to zoom though because the performance was just better than anything (we tried a boat load of tools - but most of them were just shiny saas offerings on top of Chrome). Now I’m on an M1 it doesn’t matter as much, but zoom was the only thing that didn’t totally kill our machines before that.
- hamburglar 4y ago
  The zoom dance is real. I very frequently find myself pushing things around in vain because I am only dedicating a portion of my brain to the task and I can never quite believe that it’s impossible to lay things out in a way that is actually usable. So there’s like a 5% mental cpu task that’s just constantly pushing things around due to this vague feeling that obviously I will find the better arrangement. It must be there, right? Zoom UI is horrendous. But it’s also not quite as bad as teams, and everyone has learned to cope with it. So it’s the best of an absolute shitpile. Teams will remain a complete joke to me as long as I am forced to play the “try to map initials to names” game in order to figure out who is talking. I don’t know my coworkers by their initials, Microsoft. I don’t know why you can’t just show me actual names. Meeting UI people: here is a list of questions that I find myself constantly asking myself: who is talking? Who just finished talking? Who is in this meeting? Who just joined? Who just left? If you waste an entire screen on nearly information-free user tiles and make me open a separate window to answer these types of questions (or they are impossible to answer), I hate you.
  - Kwpolska 4y ago
    > Teams will remain a complete joke to me as long as I am forced to play the “try to map initials to names” game in order to figure out who is talking. I don’t know my coworkers by their initials, Microsoft. I don’t know why you can’t just show me actual names. I’d say the expectation is that everyone sets their actual photo as their profile picture, that would probably solve your problem.
    - beAbU 4y ago
      Most of my teams meeting take place on client organizations, where I'm a guest of the directory, or just invited to the call. I never see profile pictures, and I cant find a place to edit mine. I'm almost willing to pay good money to someone who can explain how MS' user management works wrt belonging to multiple accounts/orgs/acive directories.
    - AvocadoPanic 4y ago
      Only if you already know what they look like.
      - replygirl 4y ago
        software can't solve for you not knowing your peers
        nostrebored 4y ago
        In this case it absolutely can. Show me the name not the initial.
        hamburglar 4y ago
        I’m not asking it to help me know them. I’m asking it to use an identifier I recognize. On earth, we use names. And regarding profile pictures, I’d say 10% of the people I interact with on zoom have them, and 0% of the people I interact with on teams. These platforms should get over themselves and realize people aren’t spending time customizing their profiles, because it’s just not important. You’re just a tool, zoom/teams. Try not to go wild with your fantasy of becoming a “virtual town square” that is integral to all aspects of life or whatever you are telling yourself internally. First goal is making meetings less of a pain in the ass.
imron 4y ago
> Zoom might be one of the worst when it comes to UX. For me, it’s Teams. It’s worse in almost every way.
- happymellon 4y ago
  And somehow the team/group chat feature is worse that any other chat program I have ever used. Except maybe Chime.
  - deaddodo 4y ago
    > Except maybe Chime. I thought you were referring to the banking app for a second and was insanely confused.
  - NGRhodes 4y ago
    I feel most features in teams are worse than others or have major issues. These are issues I currently have with Teams: Search results that don't allow you to go to the specific part of long conversations. Wiki that doesn't even qualify as wiki. Integrated calendar that automatically tries to make you join meetings you have not yet responded to (with no way to configure not to happen). Inconsistent ability to quote reply to peoples messages. Hap-hazard method of starting meeting recordings (anyone can do it and with the latest update they become the owner instead of the meeting organiser). External guests can't access meeting recordings. Inserts non visible spaces into code you paste in and does not strip it properly when copying and pasting out. Emoji selection popup fails to load if you join a meeting with busy chat as loading new messages takes priority. Inconsistent loading of tabs when you join a meeting, so some people cant do Q/A or look at files (but can be loaded in a separate window even whilst the meeting is running. Bigger issues like high CPU usage (massively compared to Zoom) with lots of attendees and far more limited visible attendee screens (compared to Zoom). At the moment obvious defects seem to be added faster than they are removed.
    - happymellon 4y ago
      Oh the quoting is absolutely appalling, but on my Mac it is the only one out of the work chats that actually supports pasting an animated gif into the chat. You know where the priorities are.
smallerfish 4y ago
Zoom's UX is horrendous. My biggest complaint is it logging me out all the damn time because I switch between laptop and desktop fairly regularly. But its windowing UI also drives me nuts. Their timing and marketing was clearly excellent, but it's a shame that Teams is what's eating their portion of the pie rather than Meet.
- mccorrinall 4y ago
  Are you sure the logging out when switching issue isn’t a setting by your organization?
- softwarebeware 4y ago
  Same here. Particularly the windowing. On a dual-screen setup, Zoom controls go off to other places and do not stay where they were left. I've had multiple experiences of not being able to find the Zoom buttons while I'm on a call. Second, it drops you out of meetings sometimes while you are screen sharing, and gives you no way to know. It's sporadic on my machine whether the green highlight/frame shows up on screen sharing to indicate that the content is still being shared.
- hedora 4y ago
  So, your top three choices are Google (weird ties to the US state dept), Microsoft (lobbied for cloud act, acquired linkedin and github so they could join the data with mandatory windows and office telemetry) and an independent company with weird ties to the Chinese govt. Do you really have a strong opinion about which one is the least bad choice?
  - JadeNB 4y ago
    > So, your top three choices are Google (weird ties to the US state dept), Microsoft (lobbied for cloud act, acquired linkedin and github so they could join the data with mandatory windows and office telemetry) and an independent company with weird ties to the Chinese govt. > Do you really have a strong opinion about which one is the least bad choice? I suspect that, if you're in the US or China already (which, just to say it explicitly, I recognize does not apply to everyone on HN), then you perceive a meaningful difference in whether any improper use of data will expose that data to the US, or to the Chinese, government. Even if your personal threat assessment finds no difference in those risks, then you probably at least have a strong opinion whether it's better to have your data improperly exposed to a government of whatever country, or to a private corporation.
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
UI ≠ UX. Teams, Google Meet, etc all seem to fall apart on large calls with participants who have questionable hardware and/or wifi. Zoom works with those same people. This is based on my experience early in the pandemic, so it's possible the landscape has changed since then. We tried a bunch of different options at my company, because we explicitly didn't want to use Zoom, but Zoom worked like nothing else did.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  I think it's indicative that Zoom's genesis was from unhappy Cisco / WebEx engineers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Yuan#Career https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Yuan#Career "Upon arriving in the US, Yuan joined WebEx, a web conferencing startup, where he was one of the first 20 hires. The company was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007, at which time he became vice president of engineering. In 2011, Yuan pitched a new smartphone-friendly video conferencing system to Cisco management. When the idea was rejected, Yuan left Cisco to establish his own company, Zoom Video Communications." Agreed, Zoom does shitty things. But everything else is worse.
bkircher 4y ago
Ever used MS Teams?
devteambravo 4y ago
It is. And all the other tool's UX's are MORE terrible!!!!
throwawaypcking 4y ago
I like Zoom's easy to use UX. I can't stand the complex UI of Teams and it sucks I have to use it every day.

aidos 4y ago

It’s horrible. Especially if you’re doing screen sharing / scribbling on screens all day. “The zoom dance” is my term for people constantly pushing those stupid little floating windows about. We switched to zoom though because the performance was just better than anything (we tried a boat load of tools - but most of them were just shiny saas offerings on top of Chrome). Now I’m on an M1 it doesn’t matter as much, but zoom was the only thing that didn’t totally kill our machines before that.

hamburglar 4y ago
The zoom dance is real. I very frequently find myself pushing things around in vain because I am only dedicating a portion of my brain to the task and I can never quite believe that it’s impossible to lay things out in a way that is actually usable. So there’s like a 5% mental cpu task that’s just constantly pushing things around due to this vague feeling that obviously I will find the better arrangement. It must be there, right? Zoom UI is horrendous. But it’s also not quite as bad as teams, and everyone has learned to cope with it. So it’s the best of an absolute shitpile. Teams will remain a complete joke to me as long as I am forced to play the “try to map initials to names” game in order to figure out who is talking. I don’t know my coworkers by their initials, Microsoft. I don’t know why you can’t just show me actual names. Meeting UI people: here is a list of questions that I find myself constantly asking myself: who is talking? Who just finished talking? Who is in this meeting? Who just joined? Who just left? If you waste an entire screen on nearly information-free user tiles and make me open a separate window to answer these types of questions (or they are impossible to answer), I hate you.
- Kwpolska 4y ago
  > Teams will remain a complete joke to me as long as I am forced to play the “try to map initials to names” game in order to figure out who is talking. I don’t know my coworkers by their initials, Microsoft. I don’t know why you can’t just show me actual names. I’d say the expectation is that everyone sets their actual photo as their profile picture, that would probably solve your problem.
  - beAbU 4y ago
    Most of my teams meeting take place on client organizations, where I'm a guest of the directory, or just invited to the call. I never see profile pictures, and I cant find a place to edit mine. I'm almost willing to pay good money to someone who can explain how MS' user management works wrt belonging to multiple accounts/orgs/acive directories.
  - AvocadoPanic 4y ago
    Only if you already know what they look like.
    - replygirl 4y ago
      software can't solve for you not knowing your peers
      - nostrebored 4y ago
        In this case it absolutely can. Show me the name not the initial.
      - hamburglar 4y ago
        I’m not asking it to help me know them. I’m asking it to use an identifier I recognize. On earth, we use names. And regarding profile pictures, I’d say 10% of the people I interact with on zoom have them, and 0% of the people I interact with on teams. These platforms should get over themselves and realize people aren’t spending time customizing their profiles, because it’s just not important. You’re just a tool, zoom/teams. Try not to go wild with your fantasy of becoming a “virtual town square” that is integral to all aspects of life or whatever you are telling yourself internally. First goal is making meetings less of a pain in the ass.

imron 4y ago

> Zoom might be one of the worst when it comes to UX. For me, it’s Teams. It’s worse in almost every way.

happymellon 4y ago
And somehow the team/group chat feature is worse that any other chat program I have ever used. Except maybe Chime.
- deaddodo 4y ago
  > Except maybe Chime. I thought you were referring to the banking app for a second and was insanely confused.
- NGRhodes 4y ago
  I feel most features in teams are worse than others or have major issues. These are issues I currently have with Teams: Search results that don't allow you to go to the specific part of long conversations. Wiki that doesn't even qualify as wiki. Integrated calendar that automatically tries to make you join meetings you have not yet responded to (with no way to configure not to happen). Inconsistent ability to quote reply to peoples messages. Hap-hazard method of starting meeting recordings (anyone can do it and with the latest update they become the owner instead of the meeting organiser). External guests can't access meeting recordings. Inserts non visible spaces into code you paste in and does not strip it properly when copying and pasting out. Emoji selection popup fails to load if you join a meeting with busy chat as loading new messages takes priority. Inconsistent loading of tabs when you join a meeting, so some people cant do Q/A or look at files (but can be loaded in a separate window even whilst the meeting is running. Bigger issues like high CPU usage (massively compared to Zoom) with lots of attendees and far more limited visible attendee screens (compared to Zoom). At the moment obvious defects seem to be added faster than they are removed.
  - happymellon 4y ago
    Oh the quoting is absolutely appalling, but on my Mac it is the only one out of the work chats that actually supports pasting an animated gif into the chat. You know where the priorities are.

smallerfish 4y ago

Zoom's UX is horrendous. My biggest complaint is it logging me out all the damn time because I switch between laptop and desktop fairly regularly. But its windowing UI also drives me nuts. Their timing and marketing was clearly excellent, but it's a shame that Teams is what's eating their portion of the pie rather than Meet.

mccorrinall 4y ago
Are you sure the logging out when switching issue isn’t a setting by your organization?
softwarebeware 4y ago
Same here. Particularly the windowing. On a dual-screen setup, Zoom controls go off to other places and do not stay where they were left. I've had multiple experiences of not being able to find the Zoom buttons while I'm on a call. Second, it drops you out of meetings sometimes while you are screen sharing, and gives you no way to know. It's sporadic on my machine whether the green highlight/frame shows up on screen sharing to indicate that the content is still being shared.
hedora 4y ago
So, your top three choices are Google (weird ties to the US state dept), Microsoft (lobbied for cloud act, acquired linkedin and github so they could join the data with mandatory windows and office telemetry) and an independent company with weird ties to the Chinese govt. Do you really have a strong opinion about which one is the least bad choice?
- JadeNB 4y ago
  > So, your top three choices are Google (weird ties to the US state dept), Microsoft (lobbied for cloud act, acquired linkedin and github so they could join the data with mandatory windows and office telemetry) and an independent company with weird ties to the Chinese govt. > Do you really have a strong opinion about which one is the least bad choice? I suspect that, if you're in the US or China already (which, just to say it explicitly, I recognize does not apply to everyone on HN), then you perceive a meaningful difference in whether any improper use of data will expose that data to the US, or to the Chinese, government. Even if your personal threat assessment finds no difference in those risks, then you probably at least have a strong opinion whether it's better to have your data improperly exposed to a government of whatever country, or to a private corporation.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

UI ≠ UX. Teams, Google Meet, etc all seem to fall apart on large calls with participants who have questionable hardware and/or wifi. Zoom works with those same people. This is based on my experience early in the pandemic, so it's possible the landscape has changed since then. We tried a bunch of different options at my company, because we explicitly didn't want to use Zoom, but Zoom worked like nothing else did.

ethbr0 4y ago
I think it's indicative that Zoom's genesis was from unhappy Cisco / WebEx engineers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Yuan#Career https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Yuan#Career "Upon arriving in the US, Yuan joined WebEx, a web conferencing startup, where he was one of the first 20 hires. The company was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007, at which time he became vice president of engineering. In 2011, Yuan pitched a new smartphone-friendly video conferencing system to Cisco management. When the idea was rejected, Yuan left Cisco to establish his own company, Zoom Video Communications." Agreed, Zoom does shitty things. But everything else is worse.

bkircher 4y ago

Ever used MS Teams?

devteambravo 4y ago

It is. And all the other tool's UX's are MORE terrible!!!!

throwawaypcking 4y ago

I like Zoom's easy to use UX. I can't stand the complex UI of Teams and it sucks I have to use it every day.