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Comment by jaredklewis | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know much about Matrix. Maybe in this case the key is money.

But having worked at various startups and enterprises, it is very common for lots of money and resources to thrown at projects and for little or no progress to be made.

Money might be a necessary condition but it’s definitely not a sufficient one. See Microsoft teams.

Again I know nothing about Matrix, but I found your comment about UX concerning. UX is a problem that is almost immune to money. An extremely clear vision is almost always the bottleneck. Money can always help with adding features or performance or scaling, but I feel like it doesn’t usually fix UX. Hope I’m wrong.

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The case is not money, it's clear: > The move comes at a time of growing concern within European administrations over their heavy dependency on US software for day-to-day work amid increasingly unreliable transatlantic relations

> UX is a problem that is almost immune to money

Usability testing seems like something where you can get better UX with a lot of money: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-testing-101/

Oh I doubt it, unless you have that person with vision to interpret the results of the usability testing and turn them into a single cohesive design.

Good UX comes from someone that has deeply internalized the problems a piece of software is solving for users and the constraints on those users. Most startups do this without usability testing by doing things like sales or customer support. Anyway, IME usability testing is not the bottleneck to good UI.

I don't disagree with you that you need to have a singe cohesive design vision based on solving for users. But I think that certainly usability testing can lead to even better results and is mostly constrained by cost.

For sure. But without a cohesive vision throwing money at it can only make it worse if it does anything at all.

> UX is a problem that is almost immune to money.

Unfortunately this is very well-put.

But on the other hand, I think it's reasonable to hope that the "clear vision" for Matrix can largely be cribbed from all the other nigh-indistinguishable team chat apps like Slack, Discord, Mattermost, et al. In that case money to actually make the obvious fixes might be enough.

Sometimes good enough is good enough. Slack, Teams, Matrix, whatever, as long as you're meeting most daily driving requirements, everything else is maintenance and long tail quality of life improvement (imho).

What else are Teams users going to get out of Microsoft chasing an ever increasing enterprise valuation and stock price target with regards to their user experience? Email just works, make teams comms that just works and is mostly stable. Get off the treadmill of companies chasing ever more returns (which will never be enough) at the expense of their customer base. We have the technology.

I think the PowerSync [1] team is missing out on an opportunity to showcase their impressive data sync technology by building a minimalist Slack clone.

[1] https://www.powersync.com/

Yea, if you have to waste an extra 15 minutes per day due to bad UX who cares, it’s much better that you get the self-satisfied feeling of sticking it to “the man” (American big tech).

I mean it only adds up to 90 days of your life wasted over a 30 year career. European peoples time has a lower salary value anyways. UX doesn’t even matter that much, the political meme of the day is much more important.

Microsoft Teams already is already terrible UX, we have nowhere to go but up. Perhaps you are unaware, and if so, you should be thankful you don’t have to lose time using it. There are objectively better solutions available.

I too hate Microsoft teams but it can always get worse, you have no idea.

I'm in several Slack teams for non profits and professional orgs, Teams for a client or two, IRC and Matrix servers for digital archiving ops, Signal/WhatsApp/GroupMe/Telegram groups, etc. I have been in tech for 25+ years, I am familiar with the extremes. You are right, things can be bad, that is the point of systems engineering: to drive directionally towards continual improvement. Success is never assured, but throwing our hands up and giving up is not reasonable. Make a plan, work the plan. Default to action. Work is hard.

I recommend "Thinking in Systems" by Donella H. Meadows (ISBN13 9781603580557) on this topic [1]. It's ~$10 on Amazon as of this comment, and the PDF is easy to find with a quick web search.

[1] https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3737036W/Thinking_in_systems

Care to give me an example to satisfy my morbid curiosity? I have used a lot of really bad chat clients over the year and Microsft's rewritten Skype is one of only a handful worse than Teams. Teams is not the worst but it is on my top 3 or 5 worst of the 30+ chat clients I have used. I have heard Lynk also was really bad but I never used it. Microsoft certainly has some of the worst.

Element is bad but it is way better than Teams from my experience.

Matrix is so much worse than Team it will make your head spin. It suffers from design by committee to an unbelievable extent, and its various end-to-end security features are wonderful from a privacy standpoint but make things much much more complicated.

Having used both I think you are way too kind on Teams.

I've used both and written code to integrate into both. You never have to worry about, for example, losing access to all previous messages in your Teams channels if you get a new phone.

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