| ▲ | jaredklewis 6 hours ago |
| 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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| ▲ | legulere 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > 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/ |
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| ▲ | andrewflnr 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | toomuchtodo 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | giovannibonetti 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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/ | |
| ▲ | pembrook 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | toomuchtodo 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | viccis 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | pembrook 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I too hate Microsoft teams but it can always get worse, you have no idea. | | |
| ▲ | toomuchtodo 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 |
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