Comment by stefan_
5 years ago
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.
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.
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.
Could this by any chance be Blackboard [1]?
[1] https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/01/christ-i-hate-b...
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As a student, I've never had any edtech site or "online textbook" that had good UX. It wouldn't be so offensive if I didn't have to pay $80 per semester per course for the privilege of using something that is never as good as a real textbook.
If it's an SPA, can't it be greasemonkey'd to display things properly?
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> 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.
Outlook also has had this problem of emails just not showing up. Sometimes it takes a whole day for an email to arrive. Amazingly low quality for such a wide used product.
MS in particular has the habit of actually introducing small bugs like this regularly through their usual updates. It's infuriating. One day something works the next it just doesn't. I know people who never update their machine because of this. Can't blame them. Once it works, why take the chance of breaking it with updates? It it is a certainty that at some point MS will break some functionality of your system with an update. It's just a matter of time. So turning off auto update is the most sane thing to do for most people. I recommend it myself, and if you update your Chrome or Firefox automatically it is safe enough to use an unpatched Windows for most people anyway.
Once MS started introducing new bugs rather than actually fixing old ones I knew the last MS machine I will service is a gaming machine for my family. As long as that needs to run, I will make it run. All my other systems are on linux now. Once the gaming craze is over I will ceremoniously burn the Windows license key that I used, and I will never, ever, run any software from Microsoft ever again.
Except at work of course, but I don't mind getting paid to be frustrated.
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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.
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It absolutely did, it's only just started doing it recently. Drives me freaking nuts.
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!
Ever used Lotus Notes?
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/lotus.htm
> While many users would at first glance conclude that the "arrow" on the topmost button is an indicator that this is the currently selected button, it is used to indicate that this is a "special" (a.k.a. inconsistent and undesirable) type of button. Clicking on the arrow causes the button to "open" (downward) to reveal a variety of folders. Why the designers chose to use an arrow pointing to the right to indicate downward movement is one of the many mysteries of this program.
And now the expand/collapse UI pattern with right/down arrows or triangles is standard (e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/de...). Don't get me wrong, the example button is terrible UI, but an interesting example of how norms change.
On more than one occasion I have misinterpreted the upvote icon on HN to be "collapse thread".
An IBMer once explained to me that Lotus Notes was intentionally not improved; it was purposefully bad, a form of coordinated sabatoge. The bugs provided employees with an excuse for why troublesome directives or wasteful meetings were lost.
To this day, I still am unsure if they were joking.
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The "Enter Password" at the bottom of that page is simply great.
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Currently used at my workplace.
A day never goes by without a delight.
Edit: IBM Notes
What the heck! What were these “designers” having when they made that monstrosity? Hahaha.
The "too many windows, you need to close one before opening another" message is also present in current versions of Adobe Acrobat.
as an ex-IBMer, tragically yes...
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.
>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-mic...
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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.
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.
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
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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.
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.
LOL. I wonder where that data was physically sitting for a whole minute.
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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...
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.
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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...
"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.
stupid teams chat doesn't even have a 'reply with quote' but yeah, it's got lots of edgy emoticons and gifs.... stupid.
> 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?featur...
Next maybe we can fix issue where if you have the iOS app, you randomly appear available for hours?
Amazingly, the mobile app version does!
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Even worse than Teams is Teams on GovCloud.
I think the success of Teams was a surprise to MS. It was ingenious to copy slack and push it on enterprise users though.
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...
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Pro tip: don't press Ctrl before release mouse button
This is annoying.
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…
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.
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)
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To add insult, the notifications are a separate window on macOS. So when you use cmd+tab to switch _to_ Teams, you might end up in that notifications window. Even when there are no Teams notifications, that window remains. This is very painful when in full-screen mode, as cmd-tabbing to Teams simply doesn’t work.
I’m on the beta where you can switch to native notifications, but they’ve only implemented that (poorly) for chat notifications. Calls still use their own notifications. Poorly you ask? Well the notification doesn’t show the sender when posting in a group channel; it uses the group name as the notification title.
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You would think its better on windows, but it's not. The notifications ignore the global notification settings and pop up even when you only allow notifications with priority. And they are using their own implementation as well
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Also the sound seems to register itself as a media sound, so it will hijack your play/pause functionality. If I'm playing music and get a call, pressing play/pause to stop my music will just stop the ringing while continuing to play the music. Additionally, if I get a call and pick up, later on if I hit play/pause it'll continue playing the Teams call jingle instead of my music.
It can even be seen in Big Sur with the new playing media icon in the top bar. If I click that I can see that there's an item for my music, and an item for Teams sounds.
They also get lost when you're in fullscreen. If I wouldn't get them on my watch, I'd basically be unreachable on Teams.
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I have native mac notifications? Menu / Settings / Notifications / Notification style / Mac.
My company was a fairly early adopter of Teams. I remember there being a user feedback forum that was such an optimistic place. Fixing notifications was one of the highest voted issues and the MS rep promised work was being done on it, but it never got fixed before we finally accepted the increased cost and moved to Slack.
If it makes you feel any better they use their own custom notifications in windows as well and it suffers all the same issues (doesn’t respect dnd, gets covered by/covers native notifications, etc)
Pro-tip: make a second user account on your system exclusively for presentations. There's nothing more unprofessional than some stupid notification popping up during a presentation.
In the company I work at, there are telepresence screens in each conference room that appear in Teams.
Projecting something onto the screen is done using Teams, so I can't disable Teams during the presentation. People often connect in from other conference rooms or their desks, by joining the call.
ICT probably wouldn't allow us to make another user account.
I agree that making a second user account is good practice for IoT meetups, church groups, or other presentations, but it might not actually work well in this company. Teams has plenty of other issues though, such as screen sharing in a group call after unplugging HDMI, or microphone input selection issues.
That's a valid workaround that shouldn't be needed.
FWIW I turn off all contact apps (email, chat) entirely if it's important.
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And when you share your screen the entire meeting window is minimized, helpfully showing your entire chat window.
Also, please make an M1-native version ASAP. Teams is my second worst app when it comes to memory pressure.
I don't think an M1 version would make much difference. It's just a horrifically bloated, sluggish garbage fire.
VS Code and Teams are at complete opposite ends of the spectrum for what an Electron app can be.
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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.
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.
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
Zoom works without problems on Firefox here (Linux). The browser version tends to be much better than the app, which crashes for me consistently.
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.
OMG, this is so damn accurate! Thanks for that gas station analogy!
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.
Try to zoom a document and it zooms an image file of your entire hard drive.
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.
> 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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!
Yea, if I have Spotify paused - having not listened to it all day - after a call it starts it playing again.
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.
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.
But wait! there's more (Google Meet and Microsoft Teams): https://neil.computer/notes/oh-sorry-i-was-on-mute/
Users can complain but they cannot switch. :)
Why isnt Teams open source. Microsoft supports open source, blah, blah.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
What's your uservoice suggestion URL? Will vote for it.
Alas Teams is far from the only app to control the global volume, and it doesn't happen only in Windows.
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.
Zoom does the same thing with my volume. Seems kind of an odd design choice that is pretty malware-y.
I think Zoom does the same thing on macOS, or at least it did last year.
Do you know Teams also adds white noise globally?
It's OK, they're fixing it soon by having Teams be part of the OS :D