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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.