Skype has noticed that there is a discrepancy in quality between the two versions, and has decided to make the two versions more similar to each other. Unfortunately, instead of making the Windows version of Skype better, they’ve decided to fix the discrepancy by making the Mac version of Skype more like the Windows version.
This is the number one reason that I prefer Mac-only products to products that are available on both Windows and Mac.
Invariably, the companies decide that since they have 4x the sales on Windows as on Mac, the correct course of action is to build a product that is identical in almost every way with just a very thin GUI "skin" on the outside that is Mac or Windows specific. I don't know if this is because they think that the Windows sales "validate" the UX design or if it's an attempt to save money by having a single code base (or both?), but the results are invariably awful on the Mac.
Windows users are not interchangeable with Mac users. What "works" for someone who was given their PC by the IT department does not work for someone who deliberately chose to buy a product with a tiny market share.
I wonder if you realize that because the Macs have a "tiny market share" (as you describe it) it's just easier (cheaper, too) to produce a re-chromed version of your software rather than writing a completely new interface just for those users. Also, it's a plus for the users coming from the PC market because they don't have to relearn the interface.
I wonder if you realize that because the Macs have a "tiny market share" (as you describe it) it's just easier (cheaper, too) to produce a re-chromed version of your software rather than writing a completely new interface just for those users.
Considering that I wrote that companies might think it's cheaper, I'm going to go with yes, I realize that companies might think it's cheaper.
Likewise, it's also cheaper for PC Manufacturers to sell me junk PCs loaded up with BloatWare, yet I buy Macs. Just as it's perfectly reasonable for company A to make a product that user B finds repellant, it's also perfectly reasonable for a company to make a Mac product that sucks, and it's equally reasonable for a Mac user to avoid it at all costs. Neither party is wrong in any sense, any more than WalMart is wrong for not selling full carbon mountain bikes or Ibis Cycles (a specialty manufacturer who lays their frames up by hand in the USA) is wrong for not rebranding a Chinese steel MTB at a $500 price point.
It's a plus for the users coming from the PC market because they don't have to relearn the interface.
This is not as sound an argument as the one we agree on. Replicating the PC experience with your Mac product works if you have all these PC users at the office and one day IT removes their PCs and replaces them with Macs. Or if you have a company with Macs and PCs and IT support costs show up in a report somewhere, but Mac user frustration with a poor interface is "off balance-sheet."
But if someone owns a PC and decides to switch to a Mac, it's because he explicitly doesn't like the PC experience. Replicate the PC experience on his Mac, and you may find that he switches products as well as computers.
The problem with the Mac way is that its all consuming. You completely need to reorient and reshape your world view to get past the uncanny valley of your typical Mac fan. No matter how much you polish your QT / Gtk/ Swing UI it will not pass muster. On the Mac platform native apps seem to dominate - eg textmate vs jedit/emacs/vim, omnigraffle vs visio, parallels vs virtualbox / vmware. Which suggests that if you are a cross platform company you might have to cede the "high end" mac purist to a Mac specific app.
There is also the case of the PC user being forced to use a Mac temporarily, i.e. because it is the only kind of computer available in their friend's house/school/etc. Before I owned any Apple products, I would experience this frequently, and be thankful for the programs that were a thin veneer over a windows program (that I was already familiar with.)
Surprisingly, Apple makes a product for people that want a Windows experience on Apple hardware, it's called Bootcamp. I am not trying to be witty: Things like Bootcamp, Parallels, VMWare, and so on exist so that people who want the Windows experience can have it without forcing companies like Skype to try to make their Windows applications pretend to be Mac applications.
I have Parallels. If you log into the Guest account on my machine and want to run Skype, I'd rather you use Skype for Windows and get exactly what you want than deal with something that is kinda-sorta Skype for Windows, but not enough to delight you as a user.
> it's just easier (cheaper, too) to produce a re-chromed version of your software rather than writing a completely new interface
Is it? Can you cite some sources?
I'd less native UIs to take longer, as more custom widgets and chrome is requires. Not to mention, the result is more likely to "feel wrong" since it's less likely to conform to that platform's conventions.
or if it's an attempt to save money by having a single code base (or both?)
From what I recall, Skype's Windows UI is actually written in Delphi - maybe that has changed now, but I think don't they actually have a unified code base for the user interface.
The protocol is proprietary - and in that case it is in Skype's best interest to maintain a similar look and feel throughout all platforms they support.
This of course doesn't mean that they shouldn't be doing so much more on both systems - I just think in this case the requirement of having a similar application on both systems is necessary.
There's an appropriate saying about history: it doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes.
A good cross-platform app isn't just dumbly copied at the whiteboard stage of MVC planning. It needs to have certain similarities, sure, but the key interface elements will integrate with the host operating system.
Since Windows has window-attached menu bars, why don't cross-platform apps on a Mac have the same thing? Don't say because there's a menubar object to attach commands to. I've seen plenty of apps that use nspopupbuttons to create window-attached menus while clearing the global menu. The reason it's not done is that it's egregiously bad taste. Defeating the user's expectation of how the app interacts with the operating system forces the user to break out of typical interaction into some unknown set by the developer. It's almost never a pleasant transition because someone with the ego to say "do it my way or else" generally doesn't care about testing on users.
In this case, Skype's mistake was breaking OS X's window management portion (Expose), along with the fact that mac applications are almost always one window : one task.
I agree that the application shouldn't be a verbatim copy on each system. There are obviously platform specific UI and methods that need to be adhered to. My point is that the general interface should be similar enough to be able to move a user from one platform to another and they would be comfortable enough to use the application with just the minimal knowledge of that host platform.
I'm not sure the second half of your first sentence follows from the first, but that's not all that important. OP said he'd rather use Mac-only apps, to which the response was "I guess you only want to talk to Mac users." You can very easily have (and there plenty of examples of) Mac-only apps that talk a protocol that also has Win/Linux/Android/iPhone/etc-only apps. You don't have to give up OS-specific design to have interoperability.
My second point was more that Skype should improve the application for both platforms.
Certainly interoperability isn't an issue - the point is that it's in their best interest to maintain a common application interface. For example, I work at a company of 50 people and we have all variations of Mac, Windows and Linux machines running. By being able to support one interface internally it makes it a lot easier - as well as when certain users switch from their Windows machines in the office to their Mac's when working from home.
By way of agreeing with you I will say that yes, easier for IT is "better" than easier for the users, and this has nothing to do with PCs and Macs, it has to do with the fact that there is no spot in the company's financials for the time and efficiency lost by products that do what they are supposed to do, but do it poorly.
Whereas, it's easy to measure the amount of time IT spends supporting the product. So if there are two different UIs, it's easy to see that you need two different training sessions for users, but hard to measure how much time the Mac users lose struggling with the UI.
As I said, this is hardly a Mac/PC thing. You often see it in horribly designed internal applications. It's easy to measure the cost of development but hard to measure the productivity lost due to craptacular UX. So in 2011 I still see RFQs from clients asking for search pages where you fill in a complex form indicating which field you want searched and how to search it, instead of implementing a single full-text search across the application.
You are missing my point, and that could very well by my fault in not explaining it properly.
Why should an end user, who could use multiple platforms, need to understand two different layouts for the same program. This has nothing to do with different vendors, but the fact that a company needs to invest serious time in to developing a UI that is intuitive in all platforms they are targeting. The user experience should be well thought out so that it is a great application that takes advantage of the operating system interfaces that they are working with. If that user experience is lacking then someone dropped the ball - which is a burden for end users, IT folks and so forth.
I refuse to upgrade to Skype 5 after trying it once and accidentally upgrading a second time when the app tried to auto upgrade itself. The horrid UI combined with Skype's stated desire to bring ads to the client makes me search for an alternative which sadly there isn't.
In a business setting I would say that 90% of the time Skype is used as an IM client because of its working persistant groups and functional file transfers.
Entrepreneurs take note, there's an opportunity to make a competitor to Skype even though many would say that's crazy since Skype is so entrenched. However Skype has failed to innovate and is regressing in user experience. If someone nails the group chat features first and give table stakes for the voice/video chat we'd have a viable alternate for business use.
This reminds me of RealPlayer's rise and fall. That software, too, used to be the ubiquitous, entrenched, dominant platform for streaming video. And then it was horribly ruined and competitors took over.
I have been unable to find an alternative that allows me, a Mac user, to do a video chat with my girlfriend, a Windows user, with no fuss when both of us are behind separate NATs.
It's absolutely true. I haven't used AIM much but a while ago I was trying to find an easy way to talk to my parents. When you want a hassle free experience, Skype so far is the only option.
It's absolutely true. I haven't used AIM much but a while ago I was trying to find an easy way to talk to my parents. When you want a hassle free experience, Skype WAS the only option.
It's now no longer hassle free. Like the OP I find the new Skype wretched, now use it less and would jump at helping my contacts and I switch.
Question: How many Mac users are in the internal Skype testing program? I'm guessing not many
I find it crazy that chatroulette does the cross-platform thing pretty well while using flash, but these IM clients are dedicated apps that are closer to the os and still cannot make it happen.
What's missing is all the people and business partners who are already using skype right now and who have not switched to an alternative and probably don't plan to. Users seem to be very accepting of all sorts of nonsense in software if "everybody else" is still using it and they can contact their loved ones through it. (Just like why is "everyone" using facebook and twitter instead of competitor x and y?)
And I am not sure you are in a position to tell a client "sorry, we would rather use GTalk or Jabber!".
I concur with the Skype 5 degraded UI. I also have a warning to others:
After struggling to see the benefit of Skype 5, I wished to downgrade back to the previous version. However, I couldn't find a link anywhere on the Skype.com website for previous versions. As a result I searched on Google and found a third-party website offering previous versions for download (http://mac.oldapps.com/skype.php?old_skype=37).
I downloaded and installed the older version, and logged into my account. Later that night I received an email from Skype confirming a purchase for an "Online Number" that I hadn't made. I immediately logged in to investigate and I could see the transaction pending. I managed to log into Paypal and remove Skype from my trusted billers in time.
I believe that the version of Skype I downloaded was stealing login credentials. Let this be a warning to others that are trying to roll back their Skype client!
I emailed Skype's security team (after long minutes trying to find a very hidden contact link on their site). The response was cookie cutter, but ridiculously contained a sales pitch for the very feature that was just illegally purchased from my stolen account! This was infuriating - like a slap in the face from Skype considering my state of mind:
<i>If you'd like to get more out of Skype, why not learn about all our great features - like Online Numbers? Anyone can dial your Online Number from any phone or mobile, your Skype rings and you pick up the call – wherever you are in the world.
Find out more at http://www.skype.com/go/onlinenumber/</i>;
The MD5 of the .dmg I downloaded from oldapps.com and the one I got direct from Skype via ascott's link are one and the same, though I suppose OldApps could've replaced it with a fresh version.
Saw a tweet recently that summed it up nicely: "@anildash: Seems like Skype and iTunes are battling it out for the RealPlayer Memorial Award for Most Annoying Desktop Client App."
If you remember RealPlayer, know Skype for Windows, know iTunes for Windows, you'll know exactly what I mean.
The only reason iTunes seems to be essential is because there is almost no competition on OSX. Its a fairly horrible music player / media organizer compared to most Windows based software.
I only use Skype to video chat with my daughters and it could be easily swapped over to Google chat + Video.
> Its a fairly horrible music player / media organizer compared to most Windows based software.
Y'know people like to say this, but I think it's simply untrue. MediaMonkey/Winamp/Songbird/Media Jukebox/FooBar all have the advange they're more flexible & have greater format support, but for simply listing and playing and managing your music, iTunes is far nicer.
All music managers are horrible to some extent, I am left wondering why.
I'm not talking about just iTunes and Skype, though. I can think of several consumer programs that have become more bloated with worse UIs over time- AIM, Ad-Aware, Windows Media Player, Firefox...
Seems striking that it's been nearly a year and we haven't heard a peep about making it open. I would presume that if it were, it could be possible to bridge the two protocols or eliminate the need for skype.
I just did some searching around to confirm this, because I had thought Apple released the spec back when they announced it, but you're right. Not a peep.
It sort of behooves them to release it... it would build support for FaceTime, which would make their phones more useful.
But it seems pretty certain they don't want other phones to be able to check that FaceTime box on their marketing materials just yet. I know being able to chat with my mom and sister who both have iPhones is one reason I'm considering buying one.
Seems low to announce it as an open spec if you don't have any intentions of opening it any time soon though.
They'll release it in two years but it's going to be the best spec ever written for a mobile device. Just wait til Gruber sees the indentation in the sample code.
I would venture a guess that one part of FaceTime is actually the streaming protocol it uses - HTTP Live Streaming - which is indeed by Apple and already Open Source, and used by Google, etc.
I can echo the article's sentiments. I upgraded to the new client a few weeks ago and cannot adequately express the horror I experienced when my clean, intuitive UI/UX went away and was replaced by some forsaken window vomited up from a designer's darkest nightmare.
In what possible world does coverflow for contacts make better sense than just a simple list?
It took actual time for me to figure out how to find my contacts and place a call. I hold a degree, I am not an idiot. For a program designed specifically for the purpose of calling people, for that functionality to be that un-intuitive is simply mind-boggling.
I think the most horrible part of that is that I continue to experience the same shock I felt when I first saw it each time I bring it up. It is like I'm seeing it again for the first time and have to reorient myself. I'm wondering how many times it will take for me to rewire my brain.
We have been converting a lot of groups from Skype to HipChat [1] lately and I'm surprised how many of them cite the UI craziness as a major reason for wanting to leave the platform. Obviously good, consistent UI is important but it always seemed like the general public had an amazing ability to deal with crappy UI. Apparently there is a breaking point.
One thing that's particularly annoying about Skype's UI is that you have no idea how to help a coworker using a different operating system because the layout is totally different. Certainly doesn't help adoption.
As a dev with a remote team, Skype 5 is probably my most-used desktop application on OS X, besides my IDE.
The other day, after upgrading, I could not for the life of me figure out how to bring up the number key pad while on a voice call. I needed to "press 1 for X", but I couldn't do it. This used to be easy in Old Skype.
If a power user like myself can't figure something out, chances are it's too difficult or hidden for casual users too.
"Something I’ve noticed even casual Skype users do is to send URLs by text chat during a videochat. Well… How do you do that in Skype 5?"
That burned me in a Skype call yesterday (first time using it since the new version upgrade). I had to send the link by email instead. I also couldn't figure out how to hang up a call, so I had to quit the app!
I don't have anyone to do a test video call with right now but I'm pretty sure you can drag the divider bar at the bottom of the window up and it will reveal the chat box again.
Can anyone confirm?
P.S. I personally think the new Skype 5 for Mac is a disaster
I haven't had any trouble doing either of these things -- but Skype 5 on the mac is the first version of Skype I have used. So, I get the impression that Skype 5 is fine for many new, casual users.
If the mac version is like Windows, there is a row of icons at the bottom of the call screen. One of them is a chat bubble, which opens a chat with the caller.
EDIT: I should read the article - it has this in there.
It's very similar, and having barely used the Windows version (a long time ago) I got burned with the same things: hanging and sending/chatting while on a call.
I guess if everyone is complaining, it ceases to be a problem and becomes a feature :-)
What other options are out there that are (a) cross-platform and (b) can be set to auto-answer video calls?
Skype has been in our plans for our poor man's Telepresence setup, but at the same time, I've never been super comfortable with relying on Skype, particularly with their bare-bones Linux support.
This post is right on, if a few months late. I recall testing the Skype 5 beta last fall and could not believe the step backward in usability. On the skype forums many users (including myself) left detailed UX feedback, with many topics titled things like "5.x user interface is thrill of horror". Sadly most of the user feedback has been ignored and the final product shows little improvement on the beta.
Skype on the Mac has always just been downright awful. The software is extremely buggy and confusing. Maybe some of my problems are with settings I can change, but that is bad UX in my opinion. When I get chats, I hear a noise, but then can't see who sent me the chat until I go to my buddylist and scan for a number indicating the number of messages next to someone. There's also that whole mood message thing which just dumbfounds me. The thing is though, as long as I can click a button to video chat my parents, these issues are ignorable for my usage, which is frustrating and relieving at the same time.
>There's also that whole mood message thing which just dumbfounds me.
My friends and I have come up with a pretty good use for the mood message: with a custom chatstyle I hacked together, if you set your mood message to a hex color, the header on your message shows up in that color. It's great for our multi-person chats to keep messages straight.
I try not to publicly complain too much, but when I got this upgrade a month ago I was shocked. Its so bloated and unevenly proportionate for use. It seems like they are trying to take up as much real estate on the desktop and compete for the attention of the user , i.e. move them away from gmail/gchat etc.
Skype 5 is what really got my company looking for a different chat solution. The protocol and features are still generally wonderful, but the client is just horrible now.
I'm going to have to downgrade. My mother sometimes uses skype on my computer to chat with relatives, but the auto-hiding toolbar that now owns the buttons to stop a call or activate/eactivate the camera confuses her. It confused me for ages, since if you move the mouse off the video area to the top the toolbar stays permanently, but if you move the mouse away to the bottom it auto-hides. Took me several sessions to find how to reach the chat window as well. Gah!
Skype 2.8 UI was messy, with windows popping up everywhere and sidebars going crazy.
Skype 5 is just perfect, and in all honesty can't find anything wrong with it a part of the chat while calling thing.
Agreed. I have no idea why the author prefers the 20 window view http://cl.ly/5cqD to Skype 5 http://cl.ly/5cmT I've hated Skype's UI until now. Personally, I think everyone's greatly mistaken for thinking otherwise.
I prefer it because I don't have to click five times to see everything I need to see, every time I haven't looked at Skype for half an hour. And I prefer it because I don't have to constantly switch between chats just to see what people are writing. I apologize for being mistaken in this, of course :-)
Additionally to the very spot-on dissection of Skype in the article, what I find amazingly frustrating about this version is the list of recent calls in the left-hand menu thing. I call a lot of numbers in Australia, and where it used to show the full number, now it only shows the first 2-3 digits (i.e. the +61). When I click on that to hopefully see more about which damn number it is, the title of the right hand chat/history screen thing is "+61..." ARGH. NOWHERE does it show the full number. How am I supposed to know if it was my mum, my sister, or my brother I called? Very frustrating.
I discovered more recently that if I mouse-overed the number in the left hand menu it would eventually pop up in a tooltip, but eventually is the operative here. I have to wait a full 5 seconds or so for it to show up, and that's a long time in annoyed-liedra time.
I hope they fix a lot of this up, because at the moment it's just rubbish.
Does anyone have a recommendation for a cross-platform (Mac/Windows at least) video chat program usable by casual users and which works fine through a NAT? Skype is quickly becoming annoyingly unusable for the reasons the article discusses (and more).
This change butts up against what I think is a fundamental, unsolved UI issue. Power users often don't realize how much if an issue "getting lost" is for novice users. Dave Worthington's Mom said[1] of the iPad:
Well, it’s too touchy. Even though I’m better with it now… if you happen
just to move your hand or something, you know, then all of a sudden you’re
out of what you’re in. That’s bad I think.
Notice she doesn't say "you go back a page" or "you've opened something" she says "you're out of what you're in". Anyone whose done some usability testing knows that users all the time get "out of what they're in" and are completely lost. And as the designer you are screaming in your head "You've just gone to your Account page! Just click the huge red "Back to my movies" link at the top of the page you ninny!" All. The. Time. Bless us, designers and users both.
I call this an unsolved problem because the options are equally bad:
1) Have one panel where you replace the contents frequently. Like a web browser. Unfortunately, as the article points out, prevents doing two things at once. And it forces people to learn often complicated mechanisms for navigating from state to state.
2) Show multiple panels at the same time. Takes up a lot of space, especially when there are lots of panels. Can be confusing at first.
3) Show multiple panels, but with the ability to close panels. This introduces the UI problem of reopening them. You can allow people to shrink/move around the panels independently, but that gives the user even more ways to lose something.
There are more advanced ways to deal with the problem. Zooming User Interfaces[2] were meant to deal with this somewhat... by giving everything a place and a context, they were supposed to allow you to maintain a good sense of where things are. But in practice, they turned out to be even more disorienting than a contextless browser window because navigation is less constrained and there are so many more places to get lost.
Microsoft, with WP7 does a little innovating here with their panoramic view control[3]. It puts UI elements in a context and lets you see a little bit of that context, without forcing people to do free navigation in a virtual space.
As for Skype, I won't argue that the new version is better for anyone, because I haven't seen the user testing. It's obviously worse for one person, but even objectively better designs are sometimes worse for power users who have deeply entrenched workflows in the old product. I do think there's a reasonable chance that they made the change because of user testing and that novice users are fundamentally happier in the new version. Again, I don't know because I haven't seen the testing.
But I will say that the OP is wrong about something. His problem is not the overall decision to integrate the video and chat into one window. His problem is that they hid the "open a chat for this person" button. If they had left the windowing exactly the same, but removed the "open chat" button from the user list and made you mouse over a video window to see it, he would've been equally lost.
The problem isn't that they made the wrong choice among flawed windowing models. The problem is they didn't do the work of making the UI work well within the constraints the windowing model provides. If they did extensive testing with a variety of users (including both novices who get lost, and advanced users who construct massive structures of windows to coordinate with dozens of people) they would've caught the video/chat bug.
Sorry for the curtness, that reply was from work. I actually found this site for the first time last week while searching for the subject of this very thread - I had reinstalled OSX and in the process ended up with Skype 5. I'm thankful that sites like this exist!
I have used the Feedback function to complain, and they fixed the spacing a bit from beta to release.
I can "fix" the windows version by turning off a lot of the "Today screen" and superfluous information bars everywhere. To make it look more like the old Mac version.
1) The dial pad is one of the only things still in a separate window, which is a pain when entering conference call passwords (which is what I use Skype for half of the time). Before you could just click in the call window and start hitting numbers.
2) I can no longer have two different chats open side by side.
Aesthetically I actually don't mind it. It's the huge step backwards in UX that I hate.
do you think skype will come to its senses and revert their ui changes? or is it motivated by something else, like increasing screen real-estate for eventual advertising?
We use Skype to communicate at work and pretty much curse Skype 5 every time we use it. My personal favorite interface feature is that double clicking someone when you're video chatting between multiple people MINIMIZES that person. I've watched no fewer than 10 people double click the main presenter in chat only to make a face and start fiddling with things when it does the opposite of what they want.
I've been grumbling for a while that the Linux client was still on version 2.1, but I guess that's something I should be thankful for. (Though these days with the pidgin and gnome-do plugins I rarely interact with Skype directly; I don't know how people can work in chat rooms without nick coloring.)
What really pisses me off about the Linux version of Skype is that it doesn't support multiple telephone numbers per contact. You are stuck with either using the first number in the number list (not always an option), creating multiple contacts, or manually entering the secondary phone if the person you are contacting is not available on their first phone.
There is still no way to turn off birthday notifications on Mac OS X. That is, any time it is any one of your contact's birthdays, Skype sends you a mandatory message about it which requires user action to dismiss.
This is the number one reason that I prefer Mac-only products to products that are available on both Windows and Mac.
Invariably, the companies decide that since they have 4x the sales on Windows as on Mac, the correct course of action is to build a product that is identical in almost every way with just a very thin GUI "skin" on the outside that is Mac or Windows specific. I don't know if this is because they think that the Windows sales "validate" the UX design or if it's an attempt to save money by having a single code base (or both?), but the results are invariably awful on the Mac.
Windows users are not interchangeable with Mac users. What "works" for someone who was given their PC by the IT department does not work for someone who deliberately chose to buy a product with a tiny market share.