Comment by jaredklewis
7 hours ago
I don’t know much about Matrix. Maybe in this case the key is money.
But having worked at various startups and enterprises, it is very common for lots of money and resources to thrown at projects and for little or no progress to be made.
Money might be a necessary condition but it’s definitely not a sufficient one. See Microsoft teams.
Again I know nothing about Matrix, but I found your comment about UX concerning. UX is a problem that is almost immune to money. An extremely clear vision is almost always the bottleneck. Money can always help with adding features or performance or scaling, but I feel like it doesn’t usually fix UX. Hope I’m wrong.
> UX is a problem that is almost immune to money
Usability testing seems like something where you can get better UX with a lot of money: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-testing-101/
> UX is a problem that is almost immune to money.
Unfortunately this is very well-put.
But on the other hand, I think it's reasonable to hope that the "clear vision" for Matrix can largely be cribbed from all the other nigh-indistinguishable team chat apps like Slack, Discord, Mattermost, et al. In that case money to actually make the obvious fixes might be enough.
Sometimes good enough is good enough. Slack, Teams, Matrix, whatever, as long as you're meeting most daily driving requirements, everything else is maintenance and long tail quality of life improvement (imho).
What else are Teams users going to get out of Microsoft chasing an ever increasing enterprise valuation and stock price target with regards to their user experience? Email just works, make teams comms that just works and is mostly stable. Get off the treadmill of companies chasing ever more returns (which will never be enough) at the expense of their customer base. We have the technology.
I think the PowerSync [1] team is missing out on an opportunity to showcase their impressive data sync technology by building a minimalist Slack clone.
[1] https://www.powersync.com/
Yea, if you have to waste an extra 15 minutes per day due to bad UX who cares, it’s much better that you get the self-satisfied feeling of sticking it to “the man” (American big tech).
I mean it only adds up to 90 days of your life wasted over a 30 year career. European peoples time has a lower salary value anyways. UX doesn’t even matter that much, the political meme of the day is much more important.
Microsoft Teams already is already terrible UX, we have nowhere to go but up. Perhaps you are unaware, and if so, you should be thankful you don’t have to lose time using it. There are objectively better solutions available.
3 replies →