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.
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.
"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.
Do you really have a strong opinion about which one is the least bad choice?
> 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.
Yes, the one without a desktop install is clearly the best solution.
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.
For me, it’s Teams. It’s worse in almost every way.
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.
I'm exaggerating a bit, but for me Teams is a real turn-off.
We use Teams at work, and I think it's an absolute pile of crap. But whenever I have to attend meetings using other systems, the experience is pretty much never great either.
Zoom has a weird windowing system, stealing focus all the time, and shows notifications as actual windows (as opposed to using the notification system).
Google meet sometimes squeezes my webcam image for some reason. It also transforms my PC in a jet airplane.
Chime sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Usually, it won't detect my microphone. If I refresh the page enough times, it will end up working.
Webex mostly works, but it's sooo laggy. It also needs me to have the window focused if I connect too early to a meeting and am the first one there. If it's unfocused, it will not connect to the audio, so I'm left waiting around wondering why people are always late. And it insists on showing a bunch of useless crap around the main image. I know who's in the meeting, so if they're sharing their screen, I want to see that instead of their names taking up half the screen.
Of all the various meeting tools, Zoom is the best, but that's damning with faint praise.
As someone who is interviewing at the moment. I won't completely dismiss the company for using Teams (and expecting the interviewee to 'cope' with the crap experience) but it immediately puts that company in the "hmm, I'll do this interview for the practice and maybe they'll surprise me" camp ...
Slack used to be good - especially for just a background chat, but then they hid the "start a call" option away and pushed "huddles", which are far worse.
There's a solid rule of thumb that most software that is good becomes worse. Product managers have to push new features in to justify their job, if the software was 75% good before, there's a 3:1 chance that the change will make it objectively worse, and even higher chance that it will break your workflow and cause you to take cognitive load away from important things to learn how to deal with it in a new way.
"No, we're not changing that. Your changes don't meaningfully improve the product enough to offset the disruption."
Unfortunately I've noticed that "product owners" have become significantly less engaged with steering the product direction. I guess people either don't find it interesting, or they keep getting threatened by higher up and don't feel like they have enough power or own the product.
Oh man, that calendar is such a shitshow, and it's also not only on Teams, but also on Outlook.
It's able to detect some other conferencing software and add a "join" button, for example Webex.
But, for some reason, it systematically fails to recognize Teams links sent from a company we work with a lot. If I click the "join meeting" link inside the invitation, Teams will open and join said meeting, but it never shows the "join" button on the event in the calendar view.
You know where the priorities are.
This is so frustrating. How could anyone work on this feature and not realise how useless it is to see the message in question but not any of the surrounding discussion for context.
The calls aren't too bad at all.
I thought you were referring to the banking app for a second and was insanely confused.
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.
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.
I’d say the expectation is that everyone sets their actual photo as their profile picture, that would probably solve your problem.
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.
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.
I’ve had better experiences as an attendee on other software. (I think one was Gotomeeting). Works flawlessly in the browser. No dark patterns like the way Zoom tries to trick you into downloading their malware.
And the interface was superior, in my opinion. No idea how good / bad the presenter UX is, though.
I also use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/zoom-redirect... to fix up the URL automatically.
In addition, even if I select "System default microphone", that doesn't always work correctly. As far as I can tell, that option doesn't mean to attach to the default source. Instead, it means to attach to the same source that is currently bound to the default source. If I change the default source later, Zoom doesn't get moved along with it.
It's insanely annoying. Zoom has caused more crashes ob my machine than any other piece of software.
While we are at it why can’t I control what audio interfaces are available to a specific program on a program by program basis? No, I will never want to use Steam Streaming Audio or my Oculus quest mic on a webex/zoom. Ever.
the few times I used zoom there always was problems with audio, camera or people struggled to join
Or were you you referring to Duo, which is also called Google Meet now. Or Hangouts, the other Google video chat app which also exists for some reason? Or Google Hangouts Meet, which also existed? Or Google Allo?
It's better than Google Meet because Zoom won't shut itself down in 6 months, replace Zoom with a different app with a different name, change the name, change the name again, then shut that down and repeat the cycle 6 months later.
You go to meet.google.com and it works without too much hassle.
This is a technical feat that somehiw still escapes most of the other videoconferencing platforms (except maybe Zoom, but then they try to hide it as much as possible).
What do you have against Meet? It's a better solution than Zoom. It doesn't have built in whiteboarding, granted, but for that you can use an online whiteboarding tool.
Predefined hosts is a place that is lacking. In general Meet started as a "everyone is mostly trusted" tool which is way better for office meetings so their host controls are behind (but slowly being added). Zoom is by default "only the host is trusted" which is very annoying in my day-to-day use. (For example you can't have a weekly meeting because the "organizer" is on vacation and can't start it. You can't screenshare because the host needs to approve, you can't join before the host... Most of these can be changed by default in your settings but I'd course most people in my company haven't done this so we run into problems at least weekly and need to scramble to send around a new link and hope that we manage to get everyone into the same call.
But that being said I think Zoom is still the better option for "untrusted" setups like seminars, presentations or other complex or large events. Meet is far better UX for meetings.
You are very, very wrong:
1) Old people get very confused even when the interface changes.
2) The changes are irritating even if you know Google products
3) Change for the sake of change (someone at Google wants to get promoted) is just a waste of time, especially as the products are half baked. Maybe you are very young and your time is worthless, but most people want products that just work, with a non confusing interface. Change for the sake of change is something that busy-bodies do to prove that they are useful
4) Google has killed its own products multiple times, so at some point the stuff just stops working. Why bother using a product that will not work?
Seriously, it has been few years that everyone knows that Google does its business wrong: those on top should be removed, since it is a lot of money lost. In both of marketshare lost and lots of programmers reinventing the wheel multiple times to offer a half baked product.
Every few days I see people who cannot use Microsoft TEAMS (which has a poor interface) and I can easily see that if they used Google products, those constant unnecessary changes would make their lives miserable and make them less productive. Maybe reason why Google products are a joke in corporate environment.
I dont really use Zoom, used it mostly to see how it works - and from technology perspective it can be full of holes, but from UI perspective it is much better than the competition. Also probably wont be shut down in 3 months like Google Meet Duo Allo v5.
That's a very ageist and ignorant comment. There are plenty of Tik Tok videos of young people getting confused over very simple things as well.
Sometimes age can be related but being "old" isn't a sentence to being confused by UI/UX changes.
I’ve found that the screenshare quality in Zoom is rather strikingly better than in Meet, to the point that sharing a large screen with an editor full of text is frequently unreadable on Meet but perfectly crisp in Zoom.
Also, Zoom does some sort of background noise cancellation that is really impressive. I don’t know if other apps don’t do it, or do it worse, but it’s noticeable on calls (I use both Zoom and Meet daily). I was curious so I tested it from a coworking space recently: recording my headset mic in the open room I could hear voices, an espresso machine and some distant music pretty clearly. Joining a Zoom and doing the same and my background audio was genuinely silent.
I don't recall meet being this bad a few years ago (I used to be at a company that used it for all internal meetings) so I don't know whether some infrastructure changes have occurred to make it so.
Doesn’t require a Google account to login.
Zoom also requires an account to log in.
And one of the recent Google meet offerings (not sure exactly which one but it was about a year ago) required an account before I could connect to the call. Perhaps it’s different now.
Not surprisingly given it’s gamer heritage, Discord is slick and fast for many-party voice and the present/screen-share is better than I expected, but video chat needs work and there are other nags.
I have somewhat high hopes for Telegram because it usually does things well or not at all, but I also wouldn’t want to try getting 20 people in a videoconference.
I never liked in-person meetings with tons of people in the room, and one presenter, many listener video/screen broadcast is very achievable today without Zoom. Maybe it’s a hard UX problem because it’s a fundamentally flawed collaboration model, who knows.
They made that very hard by pushing their desktop app. They also broke audio on Linux very often. Another long running bug is that after you've muted yourself in the meeting for long enough they start to think you did not give them microphone access and refuse to let you unmute yourself.
I also had performance issues on zoom, but I'm willing to ignore that since most other people don't seem to mention those issue so that's probably on me.
Neither are reasons not to use it as a default first option.
Also matrix has voice and video now and there's big blue button.
Link: https://apps.apple.com/app/presentify/id1507246666
Disclosure: I made this app.
The main "advantage" that I can see to prefer Zoom is that Zoom ("Zhumu") is considered by the authorities in China as safe, so it's not blocked there (which is convenient if you speak to people in China).
Because the UX of other offerings is so poor and zoom for most part just works.
I say this as someone who is aware of the security issues, but still prefer zoom over anything else.