Since we started to work on Microsoft Teams, our mission hasn’t changed – to create a hub for teamwork that provides people with a single place to communicate and collaborate with others so that team...
Updated Aug 25, 2022
Version 5.0
Blog Post
As a user, I'm truly disappointed at the UX this software has to offer. I apologise for the rant in advance, but I feel this is needed to improve development priorities.
The main user stories I have as a teacher on Teams are:
- Logging into Teams using a Single Sign On
- Monitoring participation of students
- Interacting with students using chatrooms
- Sharing resources to general chatrooms
- Sending assignments that can be responded using any device
- Embedding Office 365 documents and Wikis into tabs for collaborative editing
Instead, what I spend most of my time doing on teams is:
- Waiting for the SSO login screen to grant me access after a successful login (takes about 30 seconds)
- Evangelizing Teams to students who prefer using other means to communicate (Teams feels slow and dull for them, generating a barrier). My students prefer other chatrooms to Teams due to the waiting times. This happened to a point they begged me to switch to Slack, Discord, and even Email.
- Waiting for embedded Office 365 documents to load (takes about 1 minute every time I open an embedded tab)
- Waiting for a Wiki to update, which is excruciatingly slow (takes about 10 seconds per update).
- Struggling to monitor user interaction on Teams by scrolling on chatrooms and counting.
Suggestions:
- Perhaps you should do a jobs to be done analysis to find out what people is actually using teams for, including their offline tasks that lead them to use the tool. You may get better insights. Usage statistics can be misleading, so please ask people to share their past experiences (good and bad). This forum might be a good vehicle for that.
- Slack is perhaps not the best tool for collaborative Education, so please try to improve UX to help teachers and student groups make progress, by removing the barriers to entry mentioned above.
- Thankyou for the hard work.
Sidenote:
- Please make sure to launch a feature beyond desktop whenever possible. Sending assignments to students won't be useful unless mobile devices are compatible.