
Skype rolls back its redesign by ditching stories and squiggles - mindgam3
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/03/skype-rolls-back-its-redesign-by-ditching-stories-squiggles-and-over-the-top-color/
======
mindgam3
As much as I love to hate on Skype’s godawful and seemingly inexorable UX
decline since the Microsoft acquisition, I have to give them credit for this
latest rollback. It takes balls to admit that you were wrong on such a major
redesign.

No idea what they were smoking when they decided that their target customer
was Snapchat users. Skype is still relevant to me in 2018 because their core
streaming tech is in my experience still more stable/reliable than
Hangouts/FaceTime/Slack etc. Often Skype still connects on a crappy network
when these other apps fail. This alone has made it my go-to for mission
critical video chats. All I could do was cringe in embarrassment when trying
to schedule business meetings and seeing those squiggles pop up all over the
place.

Skype UX doesn’t need to be “fun”. It just needs to be usable. Kudos to the
powers that be for making a tough call to benefit their core userbase.

~~~
wvenable
Companies are deathly afraid of introducing new brands and cling to the
misguided idea of expanding their existing brand into unrelated territories.
Usually this results in the brand losing all meaning.

So here we have Microsoft trying to leverage an existing brand (Skype) into
new territory (social media). The technical aspect or what users actually want
is a afterthought.

Microsoft could release their own alternative to current social media apps but
they won't just start small and build a new brand.

~~~
ethbro
_> So here we have Microsoft trying to leverage an existing brand (Skype) into
new territory_

Did someone mention Skype for Business? (... Live 360 ME)

~~~
cm2187
And given how Microsoft trashed the skype brand, I wonder why they thought it
was a good idea to use it for a new product.

~~~
Jaruzel
Even Skype for Business is now being deprecated, and Teams promoted in its
place.

------
iamleppert
Skype is terrible. The call quality sucks, it's overpriced, video calling
sucks, screen sharing sucks, and recently text messaging stop working almost
completely. So what did they do? They moved the ability to text to some arcane
sub-menu, it's still there, albeit non-functional.

That was the last straw for me before my account got the axe.

~~~
xevb3k
What’s a good alternative, that has native apps for Mac/Windows/iOS/Android,
and isn’t attached to a social network?

(Ideally with the ability of callout, buy a phone number etc)

~~~
lawl
For VOIP I've just been using TeamSpeak3. I'd prefer mumble, but TS3 is more
user friendly and running a server on a cheap VPS is simple. No callouts/phone
numbers though, pure VOIP, and probably hard to get a customer to join a TS3
server if you try using it professionally. But imo gaming VOIP is miles ahead
of everything else, because gaming has relied on it for a long time.

None of the non-gaming VOIP solutions (I know of) even have voice activation,
which drives me crazy.

For text, my friend circle has shifted to just using whatsapp web, again, I'd
prefer Signal,or Matrix (or even IRC), but there's the network effect
_shrugs_.

I can live with TS3 and whatsapp over Microsoft Skype any day of the year.

~~~
rglullis
Hey, I looked into your HN profile but there is no contact info. I'd like to
get in touch with you. I am working on a side project, to offer VoIP (Matrix,
XMPP, SIP) and social media hosting services. When pitching the idea to
people, network effects are indeed cited as the issue to solve. I am trying to
provide an answer by selling package plans, basically as a means for enabling
the privacy-aware people to help bring their contacts/friends/family along.

Anyway, it would be great to get in touch with you, I'd like to send you an
invite link and see if you could validate some of the ideas. :)

------
PerfectElement
A few weeks ago I got a new laptop and downloaded a new version of Skype. It
forced me to use a Microsoft account and I could not use my existing Skype
name, which had all my contacts. There was no apparent way to move my
contacts. I don't care that much about UI changes, but preventing me from
using the account that I have been using for 10+ years is ridiculous.

~~~
ungruntled
On the general Microsoft account issue, my Skype account I had for 10+ years
also became inaccessable after a random criminal linked their Microsoft
account to my Skype account to make fraudulent transactions. After trying to
get my skype account back using the account recovery form, I realized that
even though I should have had enough answers to successfully recover the
account that it was failing probably because all the answers were now being
checked against the criminal’s Microsoft account instead of my Skype account.

No amount of customer support chatting or Microsoft supoort calling could get
that account back, or even get someone to investigate the fraud. I suppose
that Skype makes money off these transactions so why bother to stop it.

~~~
nikanj
I've had more success chatting with our houseplants than chatting with Skype
support. At least the plants grow faster when you talk to them.

~~~
nasredin
I hope you live in a free state like California with your "talking
houseplants".

------
nerdponx
_The company had argued at the time that the rise of stories across social
media meant it was something that all social apps would adopt. And because it
was the way people were used to interacting now, Skype needed to include the
feature in its own app, too._

When has this type of thinking ever been a good idea?

~~~
jmspring
The PMs in charge of this particular design choice did not listen to external
or internal feedback.

That is a mistake regardless of the product, space, etc.

~~~
aplummer
Sometimes it is external feedback, but bad researchers.

Customer testing: “what feature you do use every day”

“Stories.”

We should put stories in.

~~~
jmspring
The blow back on this change was so bad the ratings in the iOS App Store
tanked to 1 Star. It crept back up over time.

Early testing indicated people were not happy. The people involved made their
impact, got their promos and moved on.

When Skype was acquired by Microsoft, it was flooded with PMs (primarily) and
devs rolled in. I think LinkedIn has done a better job shielding itself from
such.

I’m glad to see the rollback, but from talking to friends and family, a lot of
damage has been done - mainly around rolling out new design above all else
despite degradation in features and quality.

------
alluro2
Skype in general was, for me, always one of the "how the hell can they be so
successful and so crappy at the same time" experiences. Calls are ok (not more
than that), but everything else - UI, resource utilization, pricing, and
especially messaging - is just horrible.

Messages are so unreliable and inconsistent that they can only be used for
something where you don't care that much if it's ever going to be received -
which is, I'd assume, not that often. I had a message from my colleague -
sitting next to me every day and having Skype open every day same as me -
arriving suddenly 6 days after he sent it. And dozens of minutes of delay is
just normal.

I mean everyone had instant messaging figured out long before Skype - ICQ,
AIM, Yahoo, MSN...It's just inexcusable.

~~~
colordrops
Just goes to show how long a ghost can live inside a famous brand. Skype
gained a lot of good will when it first came out and was by far the best thing
out there. That hasn't been the case now for at least 10 years and they have
living off of that name recognition for a long time.

------
reassembled
We've tried several different video conferencing programs within my company to
bring in people from two offices about 150mi apart in Cali, as well as a
couple of employees working in the mid-west. Nothing has worked as well as
Skype but even Skype still seems to have issues with reliability at times,
necessitating a reconnect to the call.

When we tried Discord for a while the reliability was ok but some folks had
struggled with the user interface.

Eventually IT rolled out Office365 but Teams was so unreliable for most people
in my group that we stopped using it for our daily stand-up meetings and
switched back to Skype.

Does anyone else feel like there's still room for a dead simple and extremely
reliable product in this space? (corporate video conference)

~~~
maneesh
Zoom is the best software in the world for this.

~~~
deathanatos
(I have used both Zoom and Hangouts. These views are my own, and do not
necessarily represent those of my employer.)

Zoom,

1\. Needs better call quality. The audio is often … difficult … particularly
if both ends are speaking or if one end has too much ambient noise. (That is,
it seems like _local_ noise degrades the _incoming_ signal. (To me, it feels
like it believes us to be talking, and essentially mutes the incoming signal
so as to not cause a feedback loop; but then we can't hear the incoming. IDK.)

2\. Numeric meeting IDs are a terrible, horrible UX coming from Hangouts.
Joining meeting "foo" vs. joining meeting 904-857-597. (When calendar
integration works, it's nice, but sometimes you need to convey a meeting ID
over your voice to another human, and "foo" is just so much easier.)

~~~
shadowtree
Every Zoom user can set a vanity URL for their meeting space. Most use their
firstname+lastname where I work.

~~~
deathanatos
Well, TIL that existed.

It's not quite what I'm talking about. That link is unique to your user, kind
of weirdly, and is some sort of personal meeting room.

I'd like to assign names to _meetings_ , not to _me_ ; every meeting that I
happen to schedule the meeting for shouldn't all have the same name; the name
should be descriptive of the meeting itself. That is, a meeting about widget
production shouldn't be "suzieqmeet" just b/c Suzie Q. scheduled it; it should
be called something like "widget-production". A later meeting about spline
reticulation could just be "spline-reticulation"; the URL "meet.vc-
company.com/spline-reticulation" is obvious, and trivial to transfer over
speech to a coworker.

The great thing about Hangout, IIRC, is that it sort of automatically
slugifies the meeting subject, so the defaults are pretty close to "magically
just works". Trying to convince my entire coworker base to adopt "vanity URLs"
is not going to happen, and doesn't really solve the problem.

------
dbg31415
Glad they rolled back the redesign.

Hopefully they will work to improve "Skype for Business" to work more like
Skype.

Skype for Business is just horrible.

1) Messages appear grouped by who I send them to, but there are multiple
message threads. This wouldn't be the end of the world, except if I respond on
my phone or laptop the responses go to different message threads. Impossible
to read back a message thread and have it make any sense.

2) Most of the time, there's a sync issue... I get messages on all devices,
but if I reply I only see my responses on the device that I was on when I
typed the response. Mix with point 1, and I have no meaningful history being
logged.

3) Messages take different amounts of time to get to a phone or a computer.

4) Files will silently fail to send. I look at a conversation, and it looks
like my file goes through... then I look back a day or so later and it says,
"File failed to send." So aggravating. Can't rely on it at all.

Anyway I know it's probably more to do with the instance my work set up, but
this is my first time using Skype for Business since it rebranded away from
Lync. And the experience hasn't been good. Give me Slack or Discord or
WhatsApp... really anything else. No shortage of options these days.

~~~
user5994461
The 4th point is the file sharing was disabled by the administrator. There
really should be a clear message on that rather than error the file transfer.

For the rest, I don't think that skype can work at all when opened on multiple
devices. It should be easy enough to uninstall from your phone.

------
NullPrefix
Onr can hope that they will roll back the electron app. Legacy native app was
way faster and this just feels like a downgrade.

~~~
saagarjha
At least the old one still works. I have still have the DMG on my computer
just in case it decides to auto-install the new one so I can go back.

------
jczhang
Can someone explain to me how, with modern day A/B testing, companies can
still fail with these kinds of deployments?

~~~
newsbinator
I dunno. When a Skype voice call on my iPhone ends, I look at the screen, and
press the sole red button at the bottom-right of the screen.

It's a heart, and it attempts and fails to "like" the voice call.

Then I press in the middle of the screen and the sole red button becomes a
"disconnect call" button.

How does that get through A/B testing? How does that get through, "hey Aunt
Linda, try to make a call." testing?

------
gnicholas
Now if only they would make Skype For Business comprehensible...I have tried
many times to join (not host) a call run by someone at MS or one of their
partners, and the links just end up taking me in circles. The host always said
it happens regularly, and we just end up talking on the phone.

------
cm2187
The article is full of screenshots with skype in full screen mode. But is
anyone using skype that way? I want it on the side, not taking real estate
space when nothing is happening. Instead they created a big block where you
cannot hide the conversation even when there is none. I guess Microsoft must
think that their users want to stare at a stale, old conversation and that
when they use their computers they should focus on nothing else than skype
(and full screen dialog messages notifying them that windows needs to be
updated).

~~~
mrweasel
It's not just Microsoft, every company seems to believe that their application
needs to be fullscreen, all the time. I reality I don't think that anyone run
any app in fullscreen, except perhaps video editors or photoshop.

iTunes, Spotify, browsers, editors, everything is shown in fullscreen, and
often designed like that. It's doesn't make sense on 27" screen, and it
doesn't make sense on an 13", but everyone seems to think that their product
is why people have computers, nobody want's to be just a service.

Maybe it's a little like CPU, disk or RAM. We have more of it, so applications
use it, while not giving us more actual functionality.

The old ICQ, MSN and WinAmp got it right. Take up as little screen as possible
and just sit in the background and do their thing.

~~~
oblio
Skype I don't use full screen. But everything else is full screen: browsers,
editors, 7-zip, etc.

Stacking windows makes them easier to manage, especially on Windows. You just
Alt-Tab and it's predictable where the next one will pop up.

90% of the people I've seen, especially regular people, use full screen
windows.

------
Already__Taken
I only use skype to call 1 person, Before the redesign the first call would
never answer, only ring out. The second call worked. A third+ call always has
a periodic echo every 8ish seconds.

After the redesign every call now connect pretty fast, but there is no audio
or camera for 60 seconds. Every Call & the echo remains.

Piece of shit.

------
__david__
I just want to be able to resize the computer app to a non-phone sized window
(and not all the way to full screen).

------
k__
Yes, the last overhaul was really bad. Good to see them pivot :)

------
rb808
Would be nice if they could consolidate Skype, Skype Desktop and Skype for
Business (comes with office) that were all installed on my Fathers PC for some
reason.

~~~
jetrink
From trying to hold remote meetings in Skype, I've learned that the number of
versions of Skype that a colleague has installed is inversely proportional to
the their technical ability. Usually it's easier to get someone to install
Skype on their smartphone and call in that way than to sort out the confusion
on their computer.

------
buboard
you can still use the previous versions on desktop , which threaten you every
single time that they 'll be deprecated. Today i feel vindicated though.

------
ensiferum
Skype is one of those applications that peaked about ~5years ago. It's been
getting worse and worse every in single update since then. (and I mean the UI
and the UX, perhaps the voice engine is better but that's not visible to the
users).

It's sad. It was so simple and worked well all those years ago.

------
iliaznk
I mostly have to use Skype at work, and only today I've been unexpectedly
amazed at how quickly, almost instantly, it starts up on Mac. Great job.

------
ilamont
Does this happen very often? A UX rollback for a piece of consumer/business
software used by hundreds of millions of people?

------
stephenr
Now if they'll just go back to a proper native desktop app, _maybe_ it'll be
usable for business.

------
arnon
I actually liked the squiggles.

Also, once you've tried Whatsapp calls, Viber calls, Google calls... Skype is
so much better.

------
m3kw9
It’s just a lot of social network fatigue when every freaking app is copying
each other with similar features.

