MicrosoftMy experience is that the biggest single obstacle to adoption of Teams in a technical environment is the UI.
Technical users are used to having focussed tools that they can configure to use alongside the work that they are discussing with colleagues. The UI in Teams is large, and takes up a huge proportion of the screen real estate compared to other chat clients, and offers virtually no meaningful customisation.
A Skype conversation could be pulled out, shrunk down, and sit unobtrusively in the corner of the screen - at least until version 6.21 when the comically overlarge speech bubbles first made their appearance. You could choose your font, you had reasonable granularity on the notifications, and by pulling out a conversation you could hide everything that was not currently of interest to you. Focus and control.
The UI in Teams is the exact opposite. It is large. There is no meaningful customization of the UI. It ignores your requests in both obvious and subtle ways. For example, even something as simple as shrinking the window only works down to some globally-defined minimum width. Conversely, if you want to widen the window to see more information, that works until Teams decides you actually want to see more margin whitespace instead. This is user interface 101 - the user is in charge of their experience. If I want a tiny window, it's the program's job to make that happen, not to prevent me from getting it.
Simple UI changes are among the most-often requested features on the UserVoice forums. They don't even change the default view - so the marketing department should be happy. Technical users need options. And many of those options are also extremely useful for people with accessibility problems.
What happened in the end? I persisted for a year, and then gave up. Our technical team refuses to use Teams except when absolutely forced to. The same happened in virtually every other technical team in the company - several thousand engineers. They use a different product instead - which when introduced was adopted universally within two weeks.
And the saddest thing is that the required UI changes are all basic, UI 101 changes. None of them are rocket science, and have been promised as "working on it" or "on the backlog" on UserVoice literally for years. We no longer trust that Teams is listening, or that the developers will provide any significant improvement.
