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> I recently overheard a very smart user struggle to find how to mute a group > you end up having to search the internet for a recipe as to what place to click to find which flydropping menu

I remember when software was supposed to remove pain points in my life, but now I'm not so sure. I often contemplate whether switching from Spotify to the CD player in my car will save me time, but I'm fairly certain it will save me aggravation.

I've had the same thought about alarms.

Back in the day I had an alarm clock. I set it to go off at a specific time and it did. The only failure mode was the battery running out.

Then I got a Nokia phone. It worked the same as the alarm clock, but I could even set myself notifications and what not. Worked great!

Then I got an Android phone and sometimes the alarms just wouldn't work.

And now today I'm using another Android phone and I give it about 80-20 odds that the alarm works correctly. Sometimes it doesn't work at all. Sometimes it does a quick alarm for a few seconds and stops. And I don't know why.

Notifications on this are even worse. Sometimes the notifications are so unnoticeable that sitting next to the phone with headphones on will not actually alert me to the notification.

I don't see others ever complain about it so I feel like I'm somehow missing something big but I don't know what. Notifications and alarms on modern phones seem extremely unreliable to me.

If I had a choice between my mom's 30+ year old windy-uppy egg timer vs. the abomination that is the digital interface on my stove, I would take the egg timer every single time.

Unfortunately my sister keeps stealing it (back) every time she visits!

Just buy a new mechanical egg timer? They still make them.

I bought myself one of these, and then had to buy a few more when family or friends wanted to take it:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006912104394.html

It's _so_ much better than my phone as a general duty kitchen timer. The best thing is I can just leave it going off and it'll just run down the spring and stop. _So_ much better an experience than needing to get my phone out of my pocket when my hands are covered in whatever I'm cooking.

in the kitchen is where I've found voice timers to be the best. there's an unlimited number of them, I can name them, and I don't have to touch anything to set them. which is great because I'm not very good so my hands get messy all the time. "hey Siri/Google/Alexa/Bixby set egg timer for 3 minutes"

The iPhone alarm app is an oddly circuitous process as well. I just don’t ever trust that I’ve set it correctly. Just let me type the time and move on. It’s also unclear if silent mode will override the alarm having sound.

I have a recurring problem where my Apple Watch won't sound the alarm if my sleeve or blanket is covering the screen. Like it won't even do haptic feedback. This has made it utterly useless as an alarm that's supposed to wake me up.

Recently switched from Android to iPhone and was dismayed that Apple doesn't have the "Alarm set to 8 hours from now" confirmation. Such a simple and effective UX. Overall I was frustrated with Android but it gets a few things right.

You want what iOS Clock app calls a "Timer" not an "Alarm". The rightmost icon in the bottom nav bar lets you set "8 hours from now" really easily.

(Not saying that makes your comment wrong, just pointing out the precise way you need to "Think Different" to make your iPhone work for you.)

No, I want to set an alarm at 6:30 am because I know I need to be at work early at 8am tomorrow. The alarm time is not derived from the current time in any way. "8 hours from now" is helping me verify that I didn't mess up the day or am/pm.

If I used timers I would have to carefully subtract the desired wake up time from the current time. It's not the same at all.

Ahh right. I somehow missed the implication of the work "confirmation" there. Sorry for jumping to conclusions...

fwiw, you can ask Siri to set a timer to go off at 8 am and it'll do the math for you. but then it's a timer not an alarm, for better or worse.

You can tap on the time wheels and a numeric keypad will pop up. Not the most discoverable UI, but very welcome.

I have been using the stock alarm app on an Android phone daily for at least 10 years and I've never once had it not work as expected.

I can't fathom how it could possibly be failing that often for you.

Time zones. I've had trouble while traveling when my phone decides to change time zone, shifting the alarm times unrequested ways. I would appreciate a phone that could properly understand GMT in a way that would allow me to set an alarm at a specific GMT time regardless of which timezone I step into. (yes, I am sure there are XYZ apps that can do this, but I don't see why the base OS cannot handle this without installing more apps.)

> I can't fathom

I encountered this kind of inconsistency with my Android phone, too (Samsung Galaxy S22). I think every time my alarm failed to go off it was because the phone had automatically updated its OS and restarted overnight, and background apps like the alarm wouldn't run until I entered my pin to finalize the phone's startup process.

I've usually used my $3-4 alarm clock for waking me up in the morning, and then my phone timer for naps.

Now that I just took a closer look, I was able to find a way to disable automatic updates on the phone. (I had to find and tap "Software update > System Update Preferences > Smart Update" in the Settings app.) But I like the alarm clock, so I'll probably keep using it anyway. Better that my phone isn't the first thing I interact with every day.

Same here, switched to a physical alarm clock after inconsistent alarm behavior post OS updates on my Samsung S22.

I disabled Smart Update after reading your post but considering my phone used to prompt me to update, then started doing them on its own - I wouldn't trust that setting to stick.

I have S22 but don't use alarms much. However, my wife has S23, and this very issue is something I've been banging my head on just last week! Her alarm clock would occasionally not ring, but instead the phone would give a few beeps. My wife has a bunch of stacked alarms in 10 to 30 minute intervals, and I've listened to all of them going "beep beep beep <dead>".

I don't know what's going on there; I've read hints that for some people, their phone thinks it's in a call, and manifest such behavior in that situation. Some reports blame Facebook Messenger. What I know for sure is that it isn't restart or update related.

And yes, it's beyond ridiculous for this to be happening in the first place. It might just become a poster child of how idiotic tech has become. For the past decade or so, it feels that each generation of hardware and software, across the board, is just fucking things up more - even things you thought were so simple and well-understood you couldn't possibly fuck them up, like alarms or calculator apps.

One thing that Apple has got right with the iphone is: every time it's installed an update over night, restarted, and is waiting for me to enter my PIN to unlock it, the alarm still worked.

One problem with Android phones is that they're all different, sometimes greatly so, because the different phone vendors customize them with their own software, much of which is utter garbage. The stock alarm app on mine has never failed me either, but with some other phone, who knows?

You must be missing something. I've never had my alarm fail. Are you accidentally muting the alarm volume somehow?

No idea. How would I find out that I've set all of the knobs correctly?

That's kind of the problem I think.

It's right along side the other volume controls.

I'm in a similar boat. I set everything (I think) correctly and fail to hear notifications. But only sometimes. When I check the settings they are subtly different.

I think it's something to do with how I listen to podcasts but haven't been able to work it out.

A long time ago, on my first Android phone, the alarm used to fail on me.

Since then, all of the failure modes I knew about were fixed. Now I think the only thing that makes an alarm fail on Android is if you run out of battery charge. Of course, that doesn't make me any less paranoid about it.

But anyway, the notifications seem to only get less reliable with time.

My father was in the hospital recovering from a heart attack. We were staying with him in shifts, and when I was "off", I watched the last episode of succession. I made sure my phone was on the chair next to me and the notification / volume was all the way up.

After the episode he was dead and I missed the whole thing b/c somewhere along the way "press volume button at home screen until it was full" did not actually turn notifications on anymore. I've never been so mad at UI/UX.

Turning on ringer / notification volume requires pressing volume button once, then clicking the equalizer, then dragging the notification volume up to desired level. There's no indication anywhere that notifications are silenced. I have a google pixel 4.

I'm sorry for your loss.

I had the other issue. I was at a standup comedy show with my phone appropriately silenced because I knew I could ignore the alarm this once.

And the alarm still went off making noise. I managed to turn it off superquick such that the comedian got as far as looking in my general direction and saying I was lucky I was fast because he couldn't pick me out exactly.

I hope you do understand that a system that can play almost every song ever recorded is going to have a more complex and error-prone user experience than a static 50 songs.

Teams has probably worst notification handling in my experience out of all major systems in that space.

It's not just muting, it's that it's either going to show me big honking unread counts begging for my action, or I have to mute the channel and As Far As I Know mute all notifications from it, even when someone explicitly pings me.

You can get a notification when someone explicitly pings you by enabling an activity for it... (yeah, I know)

My issue is stuff like it disabling notifications on the desktop because I turned my phone face-down, or meetings disappearing because... well, I have no idea why. And it delaying messages for hours, again no idea the reason.

Interactions between desktop and phone app were a whole extra kettle of electric eels.

It has all the worst everything in my experience out of all major systems in that space.

Yes, UI's (physical and software) have, in a lot of cases, gone off the rails.

One of my examples is the change to the button on the side of iPhone 15 used to switch between vibration and sound-on. I press it all the time by accident just by grabbing the phone. And, often enough, I have no idea I did. So, the phone doesn't ring.

Same with the ringer volume up/down buttons. Can I disable them in the lock screen? I don't think so. Once again, the ring volume is modified and you have no clue.

The other one, which is a UI issue in the sense that there does not seem to be an obvious way to deal with it, is what happens when I connect my Plantronics single-ear headset. The volume is reduced to around 15%, which is fine. However, when I turn it off, the volume does not return to the prior setting. Which means that EVERY TIME I use the headset for a call I have to remember to raise the volume or the ringer will not be loud enough when the phone is in my pocket.

My criteria has become simple these days: If you have to google how to do something with the UI of a piece of software or hardware, something could be wrong. I am not including complex tools like Maya, Solidworks, etc. Let's call those, professional tools. Anything else just needs to make sense. Not sure how anyone thought that not restoring a phone to the pre-headset level was a good idea, or having live buttons in lock mode that you cannot disable (or at least alter the way they respond in some reasonable way).

If you ask any UI or UX designer about the interface of Teams, absolutely zero will say it's good. You're giving it the blessing of designers based on your assumption that designers approve of MS UI and UX practices. They don't. Sure, some flagship products are pretty decent, but they've famously sucked at UI (and all other sorts of) design since forever. Here's one (made by an MS designer as a joke) from 2006 talking about their entirely marketing-department-driven packaging design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

We use SO MANY interfaces every day-- every screen on every app and every webpage you use... text messages, ATM, ordering terminals, shopping carts, ad infinitum-- and using those is almost universally intuitive enough to be invisible. Designers use things like implied lines, gestalt, type variance, value contrast, and things like that to make a sane data hierarchy and give users signals for what's happening in the program and what they need to do to influence that. Good practices say they should then test and refine their designs for various kinds of users to make the best interface possible. If the UI design is invisible and users can just solve their problem without having to think about it, that's good design.

When design "sticks out," it's usually for the wrong reasons. While bad designers exist, 99% of all "bad design" decisions cited by developers when talking trash about modern UI design were probably not made by designers-- they were likely made by project managers or developers that insisted their way was better, or they didn't need to check with the designer to modify something because they can make it "looks designed." If the interface looks "cluttered", they might remove useful things probably just needs to be organized. That's bad design.

I don't get the point of this semantic distinction between the people producing (bad) designs and the ivory tower label you're calling "designers". If they're producing designs, are they not designers too?

If none of the people with the title "designer" are meaningfully impacting products, who's employing them and why do they not have the same obligation other technical experts have of ensuring that meddling managers are steered in the direction of correct decisions?

Designers try? It's not like engineers can always prevent bad management from interfering with good product

> I don't get the point of this semantic distinction between the people producing (bad) designs and the ivory tower label you're calling "designers". If they're producing designs, are they not designers too?

Is everybody that has written code a software developer?

>If none of the people with the title "designer" are meaningfully impacting products, who's employing them and why do they not have the same obligation other technical experts have of ensuring that meddling managers are steered in the direction of correct decisions?

As I said, you use so many interfaces every day that are so well designed you don't even notice them. That's good interface design, and executing it takes years of learning and practice. The developers that think their interface design skills are objectively good because of what they've gleaned from working with designs, and knowing how they're implemented are like the designers that call themselves web developers because they cargo-cult copy and paste code from tutorials into WordPress plugins. Their end goals are largely the same, but to equate them is pretty ridiculous.

> When decluttering means you end up having to search the internet for a recipe as to what place to click to find which flydropping menu, was it worth it?

Strong disagree here - let me use a real world example.

On older Lexus models, the car stereo screen had play and pause buttons.

It always bugged me. Why have BOTH a play button and a pause button? The play button doesn’t do anything if you click on it when a song is playing, and the pause button doesn’t do anything if the song is already paused.

What Lexus should have done instead was have one button that changes state depending if something is playing or paused. It would take up less screen space and less cognitive load trying to move the cursor while I’m driving 75mph.

And on a personal note, Teams is a horrid interface. But I’m not here to argue that today.

I'm not sure you disagree as strongly as you think. I don't feel like the OP was suggesting that all decluttering is intrinsically bad. In the case that you describe it's pretty easy to argue that it's good because it made things easier to use (or at least harder to fuck up because you don't have to figure out which button is useless).

Imagine instead that Lexus decided to get rid of both buttons and place them under a hamburger menu.

> Imagine instead …

Aghhhhh!!! Now you are trying to give me nightmares!!!

:)

> Why have BOTH a play button and a pause button? The play button doesn’t do anything if you click on it when a song is playing, and the pause button doesn’t do anything if the song is already paused.

Because it's hard to hit a touchscreen button precisely once, especially when you're driving. And if a song is quiet you may not be able to tell whether it's playing or paused right now. Having a button that will always make it playing and a button that will always make it paused is good design.

There is no feedback from the buttons at all. If I ignore the rest of the screen, I can’t tell if anything is playing or paused. The buttons do not change appearance in any way.

That makes it even worse as now I have to look at multiple places on the screen when I’m driving. That the buttons are small makes it more annoying. A single, larger button the changed would be much, much better.

Side note - it’s not a touch screen. It has a joystick controlled pointer.

> There is no feedback from the buttons at all. If I ignore the rest of the screen, I can’t tell if anything is playing or paused. The buttons do not change appearance in any way.

All the more reason to have two buttons. If you want it to be playing, you hit play, if you want it to be paused, you hit pause. Again that sounds like good design - really anything that's meant to be operated while driving ought to be usable without having to look at it.

> it’s not a touch screen. It has a joystick controlled pointer

Ok that sounds like the problem, not the buttons

So, you're saying that tech that didn't exist was the problem, not the design for the tech that did exist???

That makes no sense.

> Same goes for a certain distro that at some point thought that their users was just people who couldn't afford Macs and threw out an IMO rather well functioning Gnome 2 setup for a what I consider a clone of the desktop of Mac OS X that had almost all of the problems from Mac OS X but unlike couldn't run Mac OS X software.

Ooh! Ooh! Lemme guess! Are we talking about… Deepin Linux? Or is it Elementary OS? I hope it’s not Pop OS, I’m on that now but haven’t seen COSMIC yet

My guess would be Ubuntu or Fedora and Unity/Gnome 3 respectively. Not that I share the hate, but Gnome 3 is certainly closely designed around some distinct Mac OSX design elements (app overview, handling of workspaces, and such).

Elementary OS was actually nice last time I used it.

Looked like Mac but didn't copy every stylistic and UX choice from the 90ies that doesn't belong in the 2020ies, like space saving menus that makes haves your mouse traversing both monitors to reach them or the mental overload CMD-tab that makes me stop and think every time if I want to switch app or window.

I was talking about Unity. A system that had a working alt-tab bujilt in but was so insistent about us learning the Mac way that there was no way to toggle off broken window switching except hacking the configuration directly.

Honestly this feel like trolling. Right click on any group in teams and the channel notifications option is there which brings you to this UI

https://i.imgur.com/z8BnaTn.png

I question how smart this "very smart user" actually is.

Well, I use Teams daily at work, and it's the first I see this particular panel, so shrug.

Magically appeared now, thanks!