This has been really frustrating to me lately with Microsoft Teams. If I'm in their app, the mute button is a microphone with a line through it (if mute is activated, i.e. if the mic is off). And the icon changes to a microphone without the slash over it to indicate that you are no longer muted. Makes sense.
But if I join using the phone app on my phone, the same microphone with a line through it (that means you are muted on Teams) indicates that you are currently NOT muted, but you can use that button to activate mute. After pressing it, the icon is still a mic with the line, but it changes to a filled in background (reverse video).
Is this because in one case, that button is a "mic on" button, but in the other it is a "mute on" button, using the same icon? And the button still does an OK job of indicating what state you are currently in, as long as you know what the button looks like in the opposite state (I always have to toggle the mute button a couple times to observe what paradigm the given app is using).
I wonder if this is the price we pay for "flat UI", where designers are still figuring out design elements without a real-world reference to look back on.
I think part of this confusion stems from the "default mic on" mindset, where "mic active" is assumed to be the default, and mute is a deviation from that state. We can trace this pattern back to the UI of phone conference systems, back through analog phones, back to the time of a literal wire connection between parties.
Many/most audio mixers (in the context of live music and recording) and their digital brethren use the same pattern - a "Mute" button which lights red to indicate that channel is silenced. But a few have an ON button above the fader which lights to indicate the channel is active.
I think it's about time conference applications rip off the bandage and take the "audio off by default" approach. We can kinda see it already with UI elements that light up when a speaker is talking.
Default state is mic active. There’s no slash through the mic, when you speak (and it’s above the noise cancellation threshold) you’ll get a green indicator on your name in the participant list. Press mute, you get a slash through the mic and you get the same indicator, in red, next to your name in the participant list. So in many ways they do both.
With a good UI one should not know what is the default - the current state should be clearly indicated. Different backgrounds / colour shades is not a clear indication even if it looks nice this way.
>Many/most audio mixers (in the context of live music and recording) and their digital brethren use the same pattern - a "Mute" button which lights red to indicate that channel is silenced. But a few have an ON button above the fader which lights to indicate the channel is active.
Hm, this is the opposite of what I've seen. On recording interfaces I'm used to having a button that lights up red when an input is armed -- unmuted and ready to record. In fact I have a digital 8-track sitting next to me that works this way.
Traditional recording studios would follow this pattern too -- the ON AIR sign is lit when the mic is hot, and off when the room is "muted"
Video conference software could certainly stand to adopt this model instead of default unmuted -- I certainly spend more time in meeting muted than with a hot mic.
I have a similar frustration with UI differences between apps with Plex. If I look at a TV show season on my phone, episodes I've watched have a blue check mark. When I look at the same season on my TV, there's no blue check but episodes I haven't watched have a yellow triangle. It always makes my brain double take when moving between them.
Device is currently ->| On | Off
------+-----------+------
Camera| unslashed | slashed
Mic| unslashed | slashed
The camera button is on a different row, and gets a background rect that the mic button doesn't, and turns green when on (vs. the red for the mic when off) … but I think that's sort of a mapping to the default Discord state & showing things that are "against normal expectations"…?
I hadn’t noticed- or struggled with this, but I guess it makes sense.
The channels are primarily audio and stream focused, with users video being second in priority (makes sense when you consider its initial target audience).
So by default mic is active, video is not.
When you mute yourself, you get a “muted” indicator next to your name anyway.
There's a pretty interesting (to me) aspect of the mic indicator/controller problem: without direct visual feedback, you can't tell what mode your mic is in until _other people_ respond, or don't. It's a very laggy tool in terms of feedback even when it's "on". In fact, you often need to test it two or three times to be sure, because your fellow meeting members might have frozen, might just be thinking before they respond, etc
It's quite different from, say, dark mode, which is pretty obvious when toggled on/off.
So the feature benefits a lot from a visual indicator of current state regardless what you choose to do for the button. It's unsurprising people try to smudge the "state" and "control" together, for the mic more than many other controls.
On the flip side, a red light has been the symbol for "recording" for several decades. If you do an image search for "record button", it is invariably red.
When I was just starting in IT (~1999) it was already a joke that you could identify where different MSFT teams wrote elements of software (say, Outlook) when a common action was implemented two different ways (explained by Conway's Law as I know now).
I don't mean to just blanket shit on Teams, but Teams is just a confusing mess of UI choices and UX design that makes no sense even within the context of using Teams. The meeting icons are of course pretty awful as you cited, but it's even more things for me [0]:
- When joining a Teams call, the toggle for video gets "selected" so that pressing Return or spacebar (I think one or both) will toggle the video on -- noticing that you did this or that the video toggle is selected is a matter of chance as it's hard to see
- For some bizarre reason Teams has a "start call" shortcut that just immediately starts a call without the usual pre-call warning items. Joining a meeting from your calendar gives you a "pre-meeting room" where you can confirm your mic/video settings before joining, but hitting the call shortcut or button immediately starts a call
- Sometimes right-click menu loads slowly and additional options load after you right-click and move the mouse -- it so happens this will usually put the cursor on Pinning the message instead of selecting reply or edit
- Regarding Reply/Edit, there is a nice button to jump right to both, but for chats one button is showed, for private messages another is shown
- All teams messages are linkable; whether or not you right-clicked on a link in the message and are copying the link or if you're getting a link to the message itself depends on if you happen to notice whether you have 2 options on right-click or 3+ options
- Copying a linked item (e.g., document, media, picture) will have Download or Copy Link button. Copy link for some reason puts up a text box across the conversation you're having that is dismissible with escape or clicking usual x in box corner -- other "copy link" options just copy the link normally, other ones (like copying channel link) will open a window with the link for you to copy
- it is huge pain for me personally that the links you copy from Teams are Sharepoint links and pasting it in a browser tries to open files in Sharepoint browser, even if Sharepoint absolutely cannot display a preview of the file: you sit while Sharepoint tries to load a preview, and only after a few seconds of Sharepoint trying does it show you a download button to get the file (thankfully there are browser extensions like Redirector [1] which can be used to create redirects for auto-downloads...just Microsoft likes to change the URL for actual downloads relatively often so occasionally you need to update your redirects..)
Teams is so inconsistent and the UI and UX are equally inconsistent -- Teams is also not shy about showing tutorial prompts for features just whenever it wants to, no matter how long you've been using Teams, sometimes it will just block the entire app to highlight some feature it wants to advertise. I honestly don't think this or anything has to do with flat UI versus other ones, it's just plain lack of attention. maybe flat ui's give the impression of a "completed" thing, but I just can't see that most of the UI/UX issues for apps like Teams are about the aesthetic so much as just a complete lack of concern over what actually using the app is like.
0 - All points here were observed on vanilla teams installations on different computers -- maybe my work just has weird defaults, but I'm not confident that is the case
One thing absolutely bizarre with Teams is that if you copy and paste the contents of a message most of the time it will paste the contents as plain text with a weird timestamped wrapper including the senders name. That makes passing a filepath or any text super annoying through Teams, most of all because it's a seemingly random behaviour --- sometimes it does it and sometimes it doesn't.
Ah I know of this one and yes it's very annoying. But I can explain the behavior for you, though it won't be any less random-seeming in my experience.
Depending on where you stop your selection with the cursor, Teams will think you either only have text selected, or you've selected the message itself. The latter is what adds the message data to your clipboard, and the border between text and message selection is impossible to tell. On MacOS I can _barely_ see some text highlighting when I grab the message, but it's not always clear.
Edit: additional complaint
Teams is bad with text in general. It inserts so many random new lines and hidden characters for cosmetic purposes only, and unless you've dealt with the issue before, you have no way of knowing why the powershell one-liner you copied from teams has a bunch of ????????? at random places like code blocks.
I'd say VSCode is one of the best optimized/built Electron apps out there. The team cares a lot about performance and weird edge cases.
I vastly prefer using Vscode if I need some IDE-esque features over something like IntelliJ these days, even if the latter is more "powerful" in terms of features.
I agree. Teams is an app of a constant stream of little frustrations to me. It’s led me to believe that no one who develop/designs uses this tool at all internally.
Not just confusing UI, but buggy UI. It’s not abnormal for people on my team to have “unread” indicators of messages they can’t get rid of. When you focus the app it does a silent refresh and if you start typing too soon the refresh finishing will delete what you typed.
I use teams all the time but only use the mobile app for audio since that's less crap than the desktop electron/etc. based apps
I recommend everyone to just the mobile app for audio since most people can't manage to get pc/windows audio working consistently and it's just works on most people's phones without issue
while I can certainly get it working fine on my pc, I have a nice bluetooth headset that is a pain to repair to my pc so I always just use the headset so I can walk anywhere and not be tethered to my pc (where bluetooth always seems unreliable in windows...)
But if I join using the phone app on my phone, the same microphone with a line through it (that means you are muted on Teams) indicates that you are currently NOT muted, but you can use that button to activate mute. After pressing it, the icon is still a mic with the line, but it changes to a filled in background (reverse video).
Is this because in one case, that button is a "mic on" button, but in the other it is a "mute on" button, using the same icon? And the button still does an OK job of indicating what state you are currently in, as long as you know what the button looks like in the opposite state (I always have to toggle the mute button a couple times to observe what paradigm the given app is using).
I wonder if this is the price we pay for "flat UI", where designers are still figuring out design elements without a real-world reference to look back on.