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.
- 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
1 - https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector