I came away from that somewhat nonplussed.
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
How Zoom works [slides]
11–20 of 149 posts
Re: How Zoom works [slides]
#12Title is "How Zoom works". 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 bi…
It is crazy how much CPU on Linux Skype uses. And it used to be very light weight. I simply closed it to avoid making my computer slower. And I only open it when in need to answer something that my phone notified me..
Re: How Zoom works [slides]
#13Rumor was always that Skype used to have E2E, then Microsoft bought it for a susprising amount of money and as first action removed server-side encryption... And therefore of course the rumor/assumption thay the NSA or similar was in the back funding the deal.
AFAIK it wasn't about E2E encryption, but P2P calls, and mega-peers which would serve as ad-hoc "servers" for coordination of other clients. That was dropped when Microsoft bought Skype and instead switched it to using central servers. However, I notice these days that calls are P2P, meaning I see in my PC's connections the IP of the person I'm talking to, so not sure what's going on there...
Re: How Zoom works [slides]
#14Ironically, I found this style of presentation difficult/annoying to navigate through
Doh—the irony. What'd you prefer?
I stopped halfway through your presentation, even though I am a Zoom-objector so I thought I would be the perfect audience for this kind of content. Here's a recent hackernews-frontpage blog post which relied heavily on images, but I found it less onerous to read:
It's the old fashioned way I'm afraid (longform single page, vertical scrolling, visible proportional scrollbar), perhaps I'm just old.
Re: How Zoom works [slides]
#15Heh, I expected it to dive into the fact that Skype also had some troubles with claiming E2E without actually implementing it, if I remember correctly. However, seeing a detailed takedown of poor design is always fun. I tend to overlook these things as a user or at least I'm unable to put into words why the design frustrates me, this is helpful.
"I'm unable to put into words why the design frustrates me" is the best summary of 99.9% of users.
And the remaining 0.1% actually read some UX design textbooks from the 90's:
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.
Re: How Zoom works [slides]
#16I’ll never look at Zoom the same way again.
It was frustrating before. But now I know all of these UX faux pas...
Thanks BuiltForMars for taking away my blissful ignorance.
Re: How Zoom works [slides]
#17What are some open source skype alternatives? The ones I have used all require central server. I would like to see something which is more p2p with super nodes.
Re: How Zoom works [slides]
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doh—the irony. What'd you prefer?
I stopped halfway through your presentation, even though I am a Zoom-objector so I thought I would be the perfect audience for this kind of content. Here's a recent hackernews-frontpage blog post which relied heavily on images, but I found it less onerous to read: It's the old fashioned way I'm afraid (longform single page, vertical scrolling, visible proportional scrollbar), perhaps I'm just old. https://news.ycombi…
Yeah, this is a great blog. Certainly some things that are easier to read about that.
Re: How Zoom works [slides]
#19A large part seems to be about the invite feature and UI, which is something that I never encountered because I wouldn't even think about inviting people from inside a video conference software. Passing links around in other channels seems far more useful to me, and is the only way I access or share meetings. And Skype, where you first have to find the people you want to talk with is much, much more annoying there than just sending or receiving a link via an established channel like email. Of course there are many different use cases, and mine isn't necessarily representative.
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.
Re: How Zoom works [slides]
#20Title is "How Zoom works". 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 bi…
10 years ago is about when Microsoft purchased Skype... If I remember correctly they received money from the government to do it and then stopped using the P2P supernodes model and switched to their own servers to track users more easily... It used to work great, I wish the pre-MS source code would get leaked.