It's pretty funny considering I work on one of those meeting products. It's also an excellent reminder for me of all the UX pain points involved in distributed meetings. Tech can be great but if UI has any friction, the overall UX will suffer.
"Providence" from Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation features a clip of a forlorn message from Mike Watt to Thurston Moore: https://youtu.be/HNo5dCbKy0g?t=62
I was only able to get through about 30 seconds before cringing, but does it eventually include someone who spends 10 minutes eating an apple dipped in dorito chips?
It's always the person who has a $500 microphone set up too, so you get to not only hear them chew, but you can even hear the inner workings of their esophagus swallowing every bite.
> does it eventually include someone who spends 10 minutes eating an apple dipped in dorito chips?
My favourite was a conference call on which, for ten minutes, we heard someone’s three year olds puking, crying, screaming and crapping themselves while the mom tried to clean up with the mute button accidentally disengaged.
The call that lives in my mind was a long time ago. It was a sales pitch selling I-don't-even-remember, but given the participants I remember probably some web publishing tool.
Then my manager, the person who would actually make any decisions, took a call and stepped out of the room while the sales-droid was mid-pitch. The other three of us are suppressing laughter, and then see $boss hang up and just walk away while a polished, chipper voice drones on about all the great features of whatever it was.
At which point we have an etiquette problem. One person looks at me uncomfortably and leaves. I can tell the other really wants to bolt too, so I break in and apologetically manufacture a vague emergency to explain why we need to pick up the call later.
That was my life, nearly every week. We had someone who doesn't mute and his kid will be crying all through the meeting. People tried reminding him couple of times to no avail.
Later, the teleconference software added a button where the organizer could mute everyone and we could solve this problem.
PM: Ok, thanks, so could we just get an update on work items x,y,z
Me: ...
---
I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed ... and mad. I assume he heard parts of what I was saying and it triggered some rudimentary pattern recognition in his brain stem that remembered he was interested in x, y, and z.
We have a guy with a mechanical keyboard on the team. After a while people just started muting him in Hangouts. It's not even the mechanical keyboard itself that's the problem, but the way it interacts with whatever noise-filtering algorithms Hangouts runs.
I'm growing to like them too; I'm not using one right now, because of issues on my Linux desktop (my xmodmap settings keep resetting every couple minutes), but maybe one day I'll buy a better one or solve the problem with the (cheap) one I have.
And heavy breather who despite everyone trying to get their attention..... they clearly are not paying attention ... but will be the first person to send a stupid email after the call.
And that inevitable callback that goes to the attendee's voicemail instead.
A good number of "Training" videos at my work are recorded meetings / webinars in which someone demonstrated a skill or walked through an issue. I've watched maybe 40 of these archived videos so far. There is not a single one that does not have the meeting eventually brought to an abrupt halt when an attendee starts shouting "MAILBOX OF EXTENSION X-X-X-X IS NOT AVAILABLE."
This is absolutely awesome piece of art. I've worked at the BigCo for the 7 years (switched to startup a 3 years ago) and this site turned me on so much nostalgia.
I could totally see this as a museum exhibit. Where I work, we regularly have people dial in from a downtown office and almost every call features sirens in the background. Needs more sirens.
The music is perfectly done, very understated and somewhere between soothing and menacing. I'm not even sure what to compare it to, some of the better produced podcasts maybe. Indirectly, Starship Titanic or Lot 2046 or something?
this thing is great. don't have time to listen to it right now and see if it's changed at all, but when i listened to it last summer, i loved it. feels all too real.
i opened a radio show with 5 minutes of it once. then i sent it to some friends and half of them thought my email had been hacked and used to send out a phishing link (i felt bad after the fact for making it seem a little more ok to click on sketchy links).
Using Hangouts has kind of eliminated the conference call problem for me. Audio quality is great, you can see who is speaking or know who wants to speak if the mute icon disappears.
You seem to be trying to make an anecdote about personal use.
This website is mimicking corporate conference calls.. and yes, companies take regular phone calls because they are collectively aware that expecting everyone to contact their business using Google Hangouts would be silly.
I dunno, we used Hangouts at Google and it was fine for meetings, though it did have some enhancements on top. It was possible to call in or out, though I never saw that feature used except "I wonder what happens if..."
Ultimately the problems with these meetings involve the social problems. Someone is absorbed in thought so they don't notice that a more quiet person in another room wants to talk. They point at the screen, not realizing that the other office can't see that. They point using their mouse cursor not realizing that it's too small to see on the screen. Or the more mundane; not having an agenda, inviting too many people, not inviting enough people, etc.
Audio quality is variable. Sometimes there's serious lag. Screenshare often gets stuck. Sometimes Hangouts (well, now it's Meet) goes split-brain and some people join to find no one there, even though everyone else can see each other. Browser support is hideously narrow. Unmute sometimes doesn't work.
Oh, and the worst part: There are all these pesky humans involved!
Seriously, most of the stuff satirized in this art piece are human factors, or at least factors that have not particularly been changed by Hangouts and its ilk.
We get echoes when someone's mic is too close to their speakers, or doesn't have echo cancellation, etc. If you get echoes, there's someone who needs to mute. :-)
To me this is just conference call by another name, with some nice extra features like video and screensharing. We still have people dialing in from mobile, cars, using a variety of devices, forgetting to mute/unmute, having background noise, bad connections, putting the conference mic in a bad location.
I remember those traditional conference phones usually having really good microphone quality and noise-reduction. You still have to invest in that gear with hangouts/Zoom/others.
Yes, especially at large, non-technical companies. Technically, we are using WebEx, but most remote folks are dialing in to a phone number versus using audio on their laptop.
I'm in at least one meeting a day that has dial in people.
At large technical companies as well unfortunately. It’s insane. never knowing who is talking, who is on the line. And that’s not talking about audio quality
There is a whole political/social angle as well. Some people are concall Jedi who can really wield power effectively on calls and dominate meetings better than in person.
Big companies still do them a lot. You also avoid the issue of people not being able to figure their computer audio out. They drive me crazy though. I usually call into conference calls via Hangouts.
Even with Skype or hangout, someone at home always has a bandwidth issue so no-cam, also constant echo issues and typing sound almost triggers PTSD for me.
I've lost count how many meetings I been in where I completely lost what the speaker was saying because someone was clickly clacking on their keyboard the whole time. The requisite "Whomever is typing please mute yourself!", never works because the typist is never paying attention.
There should be an app that logs you into your mandatory conference calls so you can get the checkmark for attending, but completely isolates the user. Then, when you suddenly have to talk, and someone pings you, it will call you, and while its ringing it will play a pre-recorded, 'Oh damn, I think I'm having connection issues, can you repeat the question?'
Hangouts is a specific tool requiring accounts with a specific corporation. My employers do not use Google to back their services, so it's a non-starter.
Phone calls, on the other hand, can work from just about anywhere using any service provider. Makes it much more useful than Hangouts.
