IDK how the Chime team managed to make such a garbage product. Like, somehow they managed to make something even worse than Teams with a UI that made Webex look modern. I know there are good product people inside Amazon, so IDK what combination of incentives resulted in Chime.
replyImo a lot of AWS products are garbage. Their key competency is making technical products for technical users from scratch given concrete requirements
replyAll the "we built it so we could say we have it in sales meetings" stuff is pretty bad
Genuinely, it was one of the worst parts of working at Amazon. Especially since I often interacted with people who only used Chime. Messages would be missed for weeks because they'd never check slack, or I'd never check chime. Awful experience.
replyDang, that's a pretty classic dynamic. It even happens between just using a single chat app and email
replyI'm trying to think of a single Amazon-made product I've used that has a good UI/UX. I guess their main shopping website gets the job done (I would argue their messy product categorization would harm my UX rating of them) but their iOS app is one of the ugliest thing I have installed on my phone.
replyAmazon's toxic culture finally caught up to them. Early on they nailed it with Retail and AWS. Since then, all that terrible cutthroat culture grinded the efficacy down into producing just abomination after abomination of any business besides, just throwing bodies at AWS.
replyAmazon acquired it. Initially, it was a messenger app (not) used in India.
replyWhatever the reasons, all Amazon UIs are always pretty awful
reply> I know there are good product people inside Amazon
replyFor UI though? I mainly use the shopping site, AWS, and Prime Video, but none of those are productivity-style apps, which need to have less basic workflows to be competitive. Can you name any successful Amazon apps along those lines?
Unless something has changed recently, Slack uses AWS Chime SDK for audio/video, so at least the core technology is great.
replyThe Chime team is still busy. They released a new version just two weeks ago!
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replyWhen AWS had meetings with us we’d insist on setting up the call ourselves to avoid using the steaming pile of garbage that was Chime. AWS folks confided that they didn’t mind and weren’t thrilled about being forced to use dogfooded stuff that literally seemingly no customers wanted to buy.
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