Hacker News Reader

Comment by usaphp | Hacker News Reader

While on topic of Skype: My God the latest Skype design update is abysmal, whoever come up with that horrible mess should be fired and never touch any design or management role at all.

And it’s not only design but the ux is horrible too, when you switch between conversation - it does not focus on the chat box field so you can start typing right away, instead you have to click it first. This is a basic stuff for a chatting app and whoever missed that is apparently clueless about ux

Edit: also if any of Skype iOS app developers is reading this - on iPhone X when you accidentally click top left corner of the phone where the clock is - for some inexplicable reason the whole conversation scrolls all the way to the top, which is incredibly annoying!

View on HN

> on iPhone X when you accidentally click top left corner of the phone where the clock is - for some inexplicable reason the whole conversation scrolls all the way to the top, which is incredibly annoying!

That's by design and standard iOS behaviour (it has been there for years). Tapping anywhere on the system toolbar (i.e. where the clock, wifi, signal strength indicators are) brings the main scrollable view to its "topmost" position.

Yes, this is an iPhone X bezel design flaw, not a Skype design flaw. :)

I just tried it on this webpage, and you’re correct!

I really dislike behavior like this that is useful to a few people but is far more likely to be encountered accidentally and feel buggy.

I like it and use it all the time and many people I know also use it a lot. It is not as good for text that is most relevant on the bottom (e.g. text messages) but really useful for webpages, etc.. Some apps implement some logic to scroll back up when you tap it again (Apollo comes to mind).

The only disadvantage is that many users do not know about this feature (because there is no indication that the status bar tab is supposed to do something like that) which is the reason many use think an app is buggy after they have tabbed on it accidentally.

> The only disadvantage is that many users do not know about this feature (because there is no indication that the status bar tab is supposed to do something like that) which is the reason many use think an app is buggy after they have tabbed on it accidentally.

Precisely why this behavior should be considered unfriendly. It's not intuitive and is prone to accidents by the vast majority of the target market.

Even just making it a double-tap would make it drastically better, and double-taps are closer to convention as well. Double-click the left or right arrows in an overloaded tab bar in Firefox on desktop, for instance, for it to scroll a full row over.

Agree with this. It's a great feature other than in messaging apps. In those, I wish there was an equally useful feature to get back to the bottom.

I've noticed that most people find the feature accidentally, but then once they realize it's an option, use it extensively.

> I wish there was an equally useful feature to get back to the bottom.

WhatsApp shows a small button in the lower-right corner once you scroll up a few messages for this purpose. iMessage scrolls back to the bottom as soon as you focus the input field. I don't know about the others.

But yeah, it highly depends on how the developers decide to implement it, which is suboptimal :(

You're kidding right? It's been a feature of iOS for what feels like forever, and it's literally the one thing I miss most when switching to Android. I have witnessed first hand, very un-tech savvy iOS users using the feature, as well as people confused (my daughters) why the same action on Android doesn't product the same result.

I thought this was one of Apple's "protected" features that everyone used/loved - guess not!

I agree it’s useful on web pages but there has got to be an option to disable that in app conversations.

Just noticed something - in safari it requires you to tap it twice, thus precenting accidential clicks, while in skype it sends you straight to the top with a first click.

If you think this is weird, what about the "shake to undo" thing? :-)

Seriously, try to e.g. delete an email from the system's mail app, then vigorously shake your phone in anger. A popup asking you to "Undo delete" should appear on the screen (Many applications hook into this seemingly standard undo mechanism on iOS).

Some things in iOS are objectively weird and unintuitive but I miss them so much whenever I use an Android phone.

> the "shake to undo" thing? :-)

"You appear to be shaking your phone in frustration. Would you like to un-delete that?" :)

I like this behavior for web pages. Not sure it's appropriate for chat history... so I think you are right that Skype probably shouldn't work that way.

It has been for years. I love it and miss this on Android (and MacOS as well).

No thanks

On MacOS it's present in Mail app at least - if you click on the grey bar at the top of the email list it will scroll to the top :).

Have long wanted a home/top gesture, thanks!

Who at Apple thought this was intuitive?

What's two flicks got that this doesn't? Or maybe if a shortcut was desired for extremely long views, why not make it a double tap?

Two flicks ?!?

Try 4-5 (or more) flicks and you also have to wait for the scrolling to happen (at the speed of your flick) .... contrast that with one "press" on iOS - it's not even close - I use the feature daily.

Maybe scroll speeds need some work on iOS. On Android, two full swipes of a long source file or pdf have gotten me to the top. Haha

Great, on iOS is a single interaction and again it has been there for ages. My dad switched from Android and actually likes this specific feature.

iOS devices aren't only used to browse source files or PDFs. You could be at the very bottom of an extremely long Reddit thread, for example, or some other really long page where it would take multiple swipes to get back to the top.

WHOA. this is amazing. Must try.

The difference is that in browser you have to tap it twice , first tap expands browser bar and second tap scrolls to the top. However In conversations it just scrolls to the very top with a first click, which is incredibly annoying.

Design? UX? I'd wish those are the only issues with Skype. If really necessary, can tolerate ugliest of the designs, if it works. Problem is, it doesn't.

It loses messages at random. Sometimes it fails to send (I was really angry when I had an important call, and my "Hey, I'm here, let's start" got stuck in "Sending..." forever - thankfully, web.skype.com worked. That message made it through only the next day.) Sometimes it fails to receive - someone asks me why I'm not responding and I check the messages and don't see anything.

And those "sometimes" are not once in a blue moon, but every other month (if not worse).

Unfortunately, suggestions to use something else are not really working so I've stopped trying. Everyone seems to hate Skype, everyone I've asked had recognized it barely works and is frequently unreliable, but almost everyone I know still sticks to it. :(

Or the desktop client on OSX keeps asking for admin privileges to install some helper tool every other day, with no explanation for why that's necessary.

That helper tool maxes my cpu every time I’m on a call. It’s amazingly terrible.

I'm just assuming I'm getting hacked by North Korea every time I say yes to it.

Have you tried the skype mobile app latest update ? It makes the desktop version look amazing. Somehow, they thought we wanted skype to be a clone of whatsapp stories or whatever. Nothing works properly, it's slow as hell, but goody you can like and put a smiley on each individual message !

I used to really like skype but it has now become one of the worst, and I'm still forced to use it due to several of my contacts being on it. Imho network effect is the only reason they aren't being mass dumped by users.

Would be really nice to hear from skype mobile's team. Wtf is going on there that stops them from shipping a quality product. There's long loading times, messages disappear, synchronization is as good as non existing.

There's not a "Skype Lite" for Android... which returns back to previous form. Why that was necessary only Microsoft knows.

I'm running Skype Lite on android.

Err, yeah, the sentence was supposed to be "... there's now ...". Typo :(

Oh god there really is.

Installed it to try, and it starts by asking sms and contacts permissions, which seems innocent enough to integrate with your contact list, only to realize "upload all your contacts to microsoft periodically" is on without asking.

Microsoft, you're really terrible at this.

(bonus point that I can't fully uninstall regular Skype because it's a "native app" on my samsung s7 edge, so at best I can disable it and remove all permissions from it, awesome)

I'll second this. I recently moved to a project that uses Outlook/Skype/Exchange for everything, and Skype is the bane of my experience. Why do I need a window for contacts separate from the actual conversations? Why do I need email recaps of every conversion, often times with redundant messages? Why can't I have a group chat that's intended to be a permanent 'room', and not just a collection of people who are virtually meeting? Skype intends you to exit the chat windows, and that's not how I use chat apps.

Is that Skype for business? I’m similarly stuck using it at work and it is uniquely awful.

We’ve been using it for years, but the video chat UI is so bad people struggle with it every single meeting. Even I forget from time to time.

That's definitely Skype for Business, and it is a trainwreck. It's also standing on foundations that are at least 15 years old, from the pre-Slack era of instant messaging - it works essentially the same as AIM, or SameTime, or Pidgin, or any of the IM clients of that era.

Good news for you, SFB is most likely going away soon; Microsoft is seemingly hell bent on rolling all of the things into Teams.

Don’t worry, they’ll make sure to replace teams with something else as soon as teams threatens to become a universal solution for business.

SFB is in my opinion just Lync still. They just changed the name and the design. Nothing else that I can see changed.

Since the update, I have no idea how to find people. I even type in their username on their and they're not found. I don't know how it works anymore.

Skype should be renamed to "Skype--" in the US. After MS bought it, it became a buggy piece of crap. Every new version had more useless features and was more prone to crashing/freezing up than the last. Screenshare and the other golden features became riddled with issues. Skype was once great. During the period in which it was down for "maintanence" many believe that spying measures were added. In any case, there are much better options these days considering how bloated and buggy the actual client-side software has become.

Agreed, the problem with Skype is not end-to-end encryption.

IMHO the last update killed it, awful interface and less features

major changes:

- the "favourites" list (useful) now it's a global directory (useless)

- cannot screen-share a window, only the whole screen (you start hearing the fan very soon on a 5k desktop)

- text chat is now 3 centimeters wide, regardless of screen size (=> useless, in particular if you are in an audio+text call)

Without this, where would we get all the work place camaraderie in meetings as people provide helpful suggestions to the presenter to get the remote site communication and sharing to connect!

From Hangouts commiseration, of course.

I agree. I still have no idea how to use the latest Skype version without constantly ending up in menus and with options that I weren't looking for.

However, I also completely lack the curiosity to figure it out. I just try to minimize using Skype as much as possible.

It's a vicious circle of wanting to flee and thereby not getting accustomed to it.

My favorites:

- If you click on a link in a conversation, it switches the focus to that link. If you start typing again, nothing will happen until you hit the spacebar, at which point the link will activate again.

- If you use the search function, there's no apparent way to get back to the most recent messages in that conversation. The only solution I've found is to quit the app and relaunch it.

They removed the search option åer conversation as well and made it match everything as long as it is written in the new client, aka totally utterly useless now. It annoys me so much!

What gets me is that there's no conversation list. So if a group conversation drops out of your <n> (15 for web skype?) most recent conversations, it's gone.

Speaking strictly about the "look and feel," I must say I love it. It's one of the most well-designed apps I've ever seen.

Per-UX, I've found Skype very difficult to use since the last major redesign a few(?) years ago. I'm not sure if the update made it worse. I feel generally confused just the same.

I am using it on Linux and I was very wary in the starting, but then it works so smooth, it is my preferred manner of video call instead of hangouts.

That update pushed me away from Skype to Signal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com