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Comment by brigandish | Hacker News Reader

The home page looks like it was designed by a 20 year old who lives in a world of Javascript package managers.

Get someone over 50 in there to kick them and remind them that "Start a new meeting" with things like "LeopardBottomSniffer" appearing under it means nothing to anyone but developers.

Here's a better design, in text:

- Who are we? This is Jitsi Meet video conferencing - How do I use it? Just type a name for your meeting in the box and get started, you'll be able to share from there.

The old line about "can someone's granny use?" this comes to mind. If I seem annoyed, I am, we need successful competitors to things like Zoom and Google but that means getting non-developers to use them.

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Granny won’t set up a room, but you can send her a link on email or Whatsapp which can open the chat in a browser or redirect to an app download depending on platform, and also offer dial in options. That seems as intuitive as the process can be. The app also seems extremely straightforward. Granny usability is actually exactly what I’m looking for, and on first glance I’m impressed.

> That seems as intuitive as the process can be.

Have you tried it with a granny? Have you ever trained people in using computers?

I have, young and old, professionally, some of them grannies, and this does not cut the mustard by a long chalk. I can imagine a few ways to make it easier.

Absolutely this. We need alternatives to Zoom and Hangouts which can be used by non-developers which should "just work" which Jitisi does to some extent but unfortunately, Zoom is still in the lead with a reason.

End users were looking for software a while back to do remote work or tele-conferencing and first it was companies that were using Zoom or Hangouts. By the time I saw actors and the mainstream media were mentioning and using Zoom [0], its mindshare was established right there and Jitsi now has a lot of catching up to do.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-51999522/coronaviru...

> The home page looks like it was designed by a 20 year old who lives in a world of Javascript package managers.

> Get someone over 50 in there to kick them and remind them that "Start a new meeting" with things like "LeopardBottomSniffer" appearing under it means nothing to anyone but developers.

I think this is a little overly ageist but yeah - if you're not familiar with the kind of URLs generated by services like Gfycat then it looks pretty strange, and it's not really clear what's going on (why is it typing these strange words in the box?)

I wouldn't say that any individual 20 year old would be more or less considerate of people outside their social circle / age bracket than a 50 year old, of course, I even know some who are[0]. As a cohort though, I've no qualms!

[0] They don't develop single page apps using the trendiest Javascript frameworks though, maybe there's a self-selection link ;-)

I looked at Jitsi's website and Github yesterday and couldn't find any documentation. For example, it wasn't clear to me why I would want to run Videobridge, or what features Meet has.

documentation is the only downfall. I did the step by step for Ubuntu, had it going in no time.

That's good to know. I'm going to give it a go with a couple of family members who really could use something like this for their businesses.

Zoom also suffers from the non-intuitive problem so I was hoping for something a bit better on that front.

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