-> Click on link in calendar
-> Accept confirmation that the link is taking you offsite (Google's fault, admittedly)
-> Accept browser pop-up to allow me to open zoom app on MacOS
-> Then start with all of the other audio shenanigans listed at the start of the article.
Even with my zoom settings configured so that I don't need to confirm my audio settings every meeting, this is still far too many steps. There are likely ways to avoid the calendar-link steps by using the zoom desktop client's built-in scheduling calendar better, but I don't want to keep zoom running in the background all day (for a variety of reasons).
But in general the most important part of the user experience for video conferencing is the amount of errors or bad connections that happen. For example, I recently use Microsoft Teams, one person was sharing the screen to present something, and for some people the shared screen simply froze and didn't update anymore. That kind of thing is seriously annoying.
The UI doesn't seem too important to me in this case because I almost never use any of it. After connecting in general the only button I use are mute and share screen. Doesn't mean the UI can't be significantly improved, but for me it isn't the most important part of the experience for a video conferencing tool.
At least part of the issue will probably be the disconnect between that style of more "work" usage and the fact its become tool at the moment for families to connect. In that regard, going through the UI as shown may be more common, and does have some more issues, though its also maybe less of a focus for a more work-focused tool.
It does seem to be decent enough for the non-host at least, where if they just blindly press the blue button on entering they'll be in the call/waiting room, which is at least fairly frictionless from a non-host point of view, and for me the bigger concern. I can deal with the UI, I'm more worried about my Grandpa or something working it out if I was doing a family call.
I think the intent in the skype model is "make the other end ring like a phone call" - sometimes that's what you want, other times it isn't.
Welcome to the future - lets Javascript all the things... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SCfNhyIo_U
I remember the time when there was a native client for Skype on Linux. It probably used less resources, yes, but it was horribly lacking in features compared to Windows or MacOS native clients. Now that everything is javascript, Skype on Linux works great, apart from being a godawful resource hog. I found it really pleasant to use over the last several years. Video calls work great, screen sharing works great, even conference calls work, which they never before did on Linux. Couldn't be happier with the changes.
I use Skype everyday for work and my quality of life is noticeably different in a bad way :(
Plus, my poor laptop is now forced to run Skype, Zoom, Slack, Google Docs, and Discord. Its turned into a cooktop...
We trialed every viable competitor in the space that we could find. Blue Jeans and High Five were finalists and I can’t remember which one we were close to settling for. Then a large snowstorm had us working at home for a few days and the experience of just trying to have a small leadership team meeting was miserable.
We paused and trialed zoom. This was probably 2015 or so. It was immediately clear that the audio on zoom was superior. It still is, IMO. (I do about 2% Chime meetings; the audio processing there is an utter joke compared to Zoom, IMO.)
If you can make the core feature of audio work and make on-boarding smooth, you can win a large part of the market, which I think is exactly what happened.
Inconsequential within a company where everyone already has a <whatever> account - but critical if it's a one-off or rare call - such as a vendor talking to a customer, a hiring manager inviting someone to interview, or a doctor calling a patient.
Of all those Zoom had the best balance of stability/resource use/call joinability
I find meet a PITA to set up and invite random people
WebRTC browser chat is great for rooms >= 6 people and is my preferred choice
But zoom works pretty well from 1:1 up to 500:1 and is very easy to join
Don't get me wrong, I hate the Zoom client but when the target audience is everyone in your company, including your PC illiterate middle managers, then I can see how Zoom is quite good
I think picking each part of the UX apart is secondary to making the key feature work well.
The UX is terrible, and totally not their strong point. When you install it should have a test my audio and video thing, and set use computer audio as the default meaning you never have to see the "join with computer audio" thing ever again.
Joining with a phone is useful for people without a computer, but the main UI doesn't need to mention it, the details are in the invitations.
People video chat with non-technical people (elderly parents, etc) and it really sucks when you have to go through these sort of awful experiences just to get two people communicating.
Zoom weirds me out in that in order to chat with someone you need to "create a meeting", then copy the meeting url/id, and send it via a different channel to the person you want to chat with.
That's all you do: click Contacts, click the person, click Meet, and they answer the call. It also shows you if they're available, on another call, etc.
Call them:
1. Click Contacts.
2. Click the person.
3. Click Meet.
Or use your personal meeting room:
1. Click New Meeting.
2. Click Participants.
3. Click the person.
4. Click Invite.
The icon is the state and the text is the action that will happen if you click it.
It's the old fashioned way I'm afraid (longform single page, vertical scrolling, visible proportional scrollbar), perhaps I'm just old.
In addition, they turned the UI into a dumpster fire and allowed Chinese, Russian and United States law enforcement agencies to eavesdrop on any Skype conversation without intervention of a judge.
1. Incomprehensible icons
2. No use of color to indicate the most likely new action
3. Weird and inconsistent transitions and dialogs
4. Many different fonts, font-sizes and text decorations.
5. Flat design makes it difficult to know what to click on.
The list goes on, and on, and on. It seems the team did no UX testing at all.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebRTC_API/...
I played around with it years ago, and it worked quite good and should have improved a lot since then, so why has no one come up with a solid solution, that does not require us to route our video calls through china, or microsoft servers?
I suppose the devil is, like always, in the details. So what am I missing?
Probably, that webrtc via p2p is hard to do for more than 2 people? But someone should have at least tried it?
Also, when in our company we tried using webrtc for standups, we often faced issues when participant A couldn't hear participant B, but participant C could hear them both. All that with video working in all directions. Or sometimes we had this issue with video.
Another reason why standalone applications like Skype and Zoom (which is known for trying to install its client too much) might be better than webrtc is that they might have better noise-cancelling algorithms than browsers.
Also, point of usability - compared to browser, standalone apps don't have permission dialogs ("do you want to allow this website to access your camera"?) and might be smarter with choosing correct microphone by default - this might be important for non-techy users who don't understand why system suggests them to choose from two microphones when there's only one plugged into the computer.
Each jitsi browser instance tells webrtc to encode and send multiple spatial layers of the same video stream (at different qualities), allowing users (and the SFU) to automatically choose which one to receive, according to bandwidth and network congestion.
The result is a seamless experience that just works, even with 16+ people (we've been doing jitsi conferences nearly every working day since April at our dance school, it works like a charm and is easily customizable).
Other solutions also use custom additional WASM modules for echo cancelation and noise suppression in webrtc; and jitsi has an excellent dropdown UI with previews for choosing audio/video sources (and sinks!).
Although I think the title is misleading. I was expecting something more technical, as most "how X works" articles and videos tend to be.
"Zoom's UI is bad" would be more descriptive. Even "How Zoom doesn't work" would be more accurate to the content.
It was frustrating before. But now I know all of these UX faux pas...
Thanks BuiltForMars for taking away my blissful ignorance.
Zoom on the other hand pesters me endlessly into installing their software, making it unnecessarily difficult to just join by browser.
- It takes 4-5 clicks to create a meeting and share the URL, which is what I want to do most of the time, multiple times a day. I end up preferring Skype (when with only 1-2 other people) just because of the hassle of "Creating a meeting".
- The UI randomly moves around: the chat button and the chat, for example, are in a place when Zoom is in window mode, in a different place when Zoom is fullscreen, and yet another place when I'm sharing the screen. If I have to teach, I prepare the various zoom windows (chat, participants, videos) in a certain configuration. As soon as I start sharing screen everything changes. It goes fullscreen whenever it likes, and all that.
At least on desktop, even though the help text explicitly says "If you have Zoom Client installed", you can actually click the Launch Meeting button/link to reveal a hidden option for joining the meeting without actually installing (which requires an additional click). I imagine this never shows up if you actually install; they're just trying to get people to install unnecessarily.
Think I've maybe used Zoom 3 times, but even I was mentally shouting answers to the rhetorical questions. "Well it does that because.." or "Well if it didn't do that, then users would.." etc
In fact, Teams seems to have better (although still not good) UX and connection reliability as well, at least for corporate meetings. There’s generally no P2P possible from behind “enterprise” security gear or VPNs, so Zoom suffers a bit falling back while Teams blissfully just works via TCP/443 or a browser.
It's a good article with valid points but nothing about Skype.
The editorialized title "Turns out Zoom isn't all that different to Skype after all" has no appreciation for how hostile Skype's technology has become in the past 10 years. It went from nicely working Qt program that worked well on OSX, Linux, and Windows to Electron beast that maybe works on Windows, could possibly be mining bitcoins on OS X (judging by how much it spins up the fans), and I think it stopped working on Linux altogether, replaced by a web client.
I am in a country with poor internet, and when no one is sharing their screen, I prefer to turn off incoming (and outgoing) video. Others can continue to benefit from seeing each other on video, while I get to talk and hear them properly.
They have a "low bandwidth" mode you can toggle on, that just turns off your outgoing and incoming video streams. I think it still tries to send around screen shares though, for better or worse.
It has made a huge difference for some team members with very challenged Internet connectivity where they can just put themselves in low bandwidth mode and the call carries on.
Unlike Teams client.
After a few minutes, I realised he was talking about my laptop. I presume I had been promoted to a supernode thanks to my location and bandwidth. This was around 2009.
Got a source for this? Not that I find it hard to believe.
First: fans take off.
Second: Skype lowers all volumes of all other apps without asking.
Third: some people now have a weird floating bar in screen during the game, if clicked by accident the game minimizes.
Fourth: sound quality is horrible. How can a built-in, afterthought like Voice comms in LoL be better than a program written from the ground up to do voice calls?
Fifth: after the game ends the group has 3 spammers sending them a message since they logged into Skype.
Never again.
I got bitten by that using another VoIP client (not Skype).
Personally I only keep Skype around for one specific customer.
If you are using the mobile app then just lol. You'll always be seen as "away" even if actively engaging in discussions, and you'll be thinking you're caught in a time-trap with regards to accuracy of statuses and messages.
And my final rant is the pathetic conflation of "team" and "channel" nomenclature. The fuck is wrong with just calling them channels?
Teams is based (used to be shared code) on Skype For Bussiness, and it was designed to work better in office environments. A while ago they were struggling with the opposite- working over slower unreliable lines.
Skype was originally written in Delphi on Windows. Linux and OSX ports used QT.
Nowadays the Skype app is just single codebase written in React Native and it targets multiple platforms: UWP, Electron, Android and iOS.
Nowadays you actually have a chance to make an audio call, even if you're not on the right Ubuntu LTS version.
And I've been using it on MacOS for the last couple of years. Not as a main communication channel, but it's a good meeting place and it supported video chats in our group of 10 people without issues, but granted I don't have experience with more than that.
Nitpick: I believe it was only Qt on Linux. (I know the core of it was once Delphi as well, i believe that was purely not UI though.)
Also, I remember that MS used to still offer a "Skype for Desktop" native app on windows, additionally to the electron based app. I haven't used Windows/Skype for some time now though, so I'm not sure.
More relevant is that it went from a p2p network structure to full centralized under Microsoft.
I just installed the snap now and it seems a lot better and it seems to support video calls on Linux (didn't try to call anyone since everyone I know left skype). Too little too late.
Looks like they stole the remaining credit out of my account though.
Linux client works great! Probably precisely because it's now an electron app.
