COVID-19, a new coronavirus disease, was identified as a ‘pandemic’ by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020, due to its quick global spread [1]. Following that, governments started to announce lockdowns, prompting educational institutions to suddenly take decisions on an unexpected and compulsory shift to online teaching. Academic institutions faced challenges as a result of this rapid academic revolution, as there was no prior preparation for both educators and learners, resulting in several challenges while practicing the online learning process. This complete transformation to online learning and online teaching requires a suitable evaluation that measures and reflects the quality of the entire learning and teaching experience [2]. An important aspect of this evaluation is evaluating the online meeting platforms considering how user-friendly these platforms are and how effective and efficient they are in achieving the specified goals for teaching.

Microsoft Teams was the primary platform used at Philadelphia University for the rapid shift to online teaching during COVID-19 and later. However, by all means, it was a big challenge to use this platform, not only within our university but also worldwide. This was due to the lack of knowledge in using these platforms for online teaching. As a teaching platform, it has been improving since then to match the needs of the users and to become easier to use. However, it has been reported by many lecturers that they are still facing lots of difficulties while using the platform.

Usability is a fundamental criterion for assessing e-learning technology and systems as it reflects the quality and prioritizes the users’ actual needs [3]. Therefore, evaluating the usability of the used platform and investigating its contribution to the learning process is crucial. This paper evaluates the usability of Microsoft Teams as an online teaching platform. It also examines how other platforms such as Zoom, which are used for online teaching, meet the requirements of educators. Moreover, the paper identifies several shortcomings and challenges with Microsoft Teams as an online teaching platform in comparison to Zoom as a platform that is used for the same purpose. The paper does not consider more specialized Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) platforms, which tend to focus on supporting learners generally. The problem addressed here is on some of the most adopted platforms—notably Microsoft Teams and Zoom—that were used to supplement established VLEs to provide a synchronous learning environment.

Usability, as explained by the International Standards Organization [4], is the extent to which a product can be utilized by specific users to accomplish specific goals in a given application context with efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction [5]. Moreover, [6] defined usability as a metric that measures how efficiently, effectively, and successfully a specific user can use a product or design to achieve a specified objective in a given context. Therefore, usability is a quality metric that assesses how easy it is to use a user interface, and during the design phase, “usability” refers to techniques for enhancing the ease of use [7]. In this paper, usability is defined as a quality metric that assesses how easily, effectively, and efficiently a platform can achieve a user’s goals.

Usability is important because it is one of the key factors in gaining users’ satisfaction and confidence, which is essential to the survival of platforms such as MS Teams. If users were not satisfied with the existing platform, they would look for a reasonable alternative that delivers all of the features offered by the current platform.

Thus, from the previous definitions and as explained by [8], we perceived that in studying the usability of Microsoft Teams we have three important aspects to focus on as shown in Table 1: specified users (lecturers in our case), goal (delivering an online lecture in our case), and context (teaching in our case).

Furthermore, studying the usability of Microsoft Teams should be directed to measure its effectiveness, efficiency, and the extent to which users are satisfied.

A review of the literature revealed that researchers can employ either usability testing (User Experience (UX) is another name for it) or Heuristic evaluation to examine and assess the usability of online learning platforms. Usability evaluation is the process of assessing a product or device’s usability on several levels [9]. The process, that concentrates on observing users while interacting with a product when carrying out genuine and meaningful tasks, is called usability testing [8]. Usability tests and inspection methodologies may be performed to measure and evaluate the usability of a product that has already been designed into it [10]. Moreover, in usability tests, the focus is on the potential end users and their experience while using the product. In the case of e-learning systems, individual interviews, questionnaires, online surveys, heuristic evaluations, expert reviews, remote testing, and other approaches can be utilized for evaluating their usability [11].

A well-known technique for quick evaluation of the effectiveness of new technologies and interface problems is heuristic evaluation [3,12,13]. Daniela and Rusu [10] identified heuristic evaluation as one of these approaches, which is a type of inspection that finds usability issues using usability heuristics or principles. Moreover, remote usability testing is possible when the user is at a different location (either unmoderated or moderated) [11]. Additionally, [13,14] defined heuristic evaluation as a method for usability evaluation that is informed by heuristics analysis in which several specialists in the field are required to apply their specialized knowledge to speculate on an interface solution. The ten basic concepts of interaction, designed by Jakob Nielsen [15] that were updated in November 2020, are general rules of thumb rather than particular usability requirements or guidelines, thus, they are known as “heuristics”. Therefore, using these ten heuristics while developing interfaces is regarded best practice. To determine whether a system adheres to usability standards, a system should be evaluated by three to five experts because using multiple evaluators has the potential to produce more accurate results.

Squires and Preece [16] originally proposed the use of heuristic evaluation to measure usability, quality, and potential for learning the applications with an educational focus. Albion and Benson et al. [17] also used Nielson’s heuristics and added extra heuristics to them that are related to e-learning. Moreover, [18] applied the heuristics that were developed by [16] for pedagogic applications. Even though heuristic evaluation is frequently employed in online learning and other domains, not everyone follows Nielsen’s suggested ten principles [9].

Thus, it can be seen that there are many methods for measuring usability in the literature, as without measurement, it is impossible to control usability requirements or to determine if a product has developed to meet its users’ requirements [19].

Microsoft Teams is a software that was developed by Microsoft in the Office 365 bundle. This communication platform offers file storing, chatting and video/voice conferencing, which has the potential to enable its users to perform group discussions as well as one-to-one meetings. Due to the pandemic, Microsoft Teams and some of its competitors such as Google Meet and Zoom gained much more interest and usage in the educational field.

The number of users of Microsoft Teams has increased significantly between 2019 and 2022. In 2019, the number of daily active users was 13 million [20], while in 2022 it reached more than 270 million monthly active users [21]. That increase was because of the improvement in the features that were provided by Microsoft Teams to its users as there are some features that help in enhancing the education process and virtual learning such as chatting, creating teams, conversations as groups, quizzes, assignments, and channels.

The most popular technologies for lectures in higher education institutions recently have been Microsoft Teams and Zoom, and because these platforms were not created with education in mind at first, learning effectiveness was noticeably diminished [9]. Many studies such as [22,23] stated that during online lectures, both students and teachers reported numerous issues.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and the sudden transfer to online learning, [24] conducted research in Jenin city to see how using technologies such as Microsoft Teams helped to enrich English education. The results of studying a sample of twenty-five (25) English language teachers showed that Microsoft Teams has features that enrich the interactive learning process by allowing users to share content and files, as well as screen sharing, which allows educators to present appropriate content while the class is online.

Sari and Nayir [25], on the other hand, looked at how teachers, administrators, and scholars felt about continuing online education. The data were analyzed by a working group of 65 teachers. The research revealed issues with students’ Internet access, as well as a lack of infrastructure and classroom management as a result.

Moreover, [26] assessed and contrasted the online learning tools’ usefulness using the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire, which primarily focuses on efficiency, ease of use, and ease of learning. The findings of this research show that, compared to e-learning platforms and Microsoft Teams, Zoom performs better in terms of usability. Additionally, [27] combined the System Usability Scale (SUS), Human–Computer Interaction (HCI)-based technique, Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), and Information Systems (IS)-based approach to use them for the usability evaluation of Microsoft Teams. In their study, [27] assessed the efficiency of Microsoft Teams as an online learning platform in terms of how usable it is seen by students. However, educators (lecturers) are also on another side of this argument and knowing about their perspectives on the usability of online learning platforms is vital.

After reviewing the literature, we found that e-learning platforms’ usability was the subject of many studies. These studies used many heuristics for evaluating the overall experience of online learning; however, they were frequently not focused on the teaching experience while delivering an online lecture. Accordingly, there is a scarcity of studies that consider evaluating the educators’ experience while using online teaching platforms, especially the usability of Microsoft Teams as an online teaching platform. Thus, this paper utilizes Nielsen’s heuristics for the evaluation of Microsoft Teams as an online teaching platform. In order to validate our results, Zoom is also evaluated as it is a platform that is in use for the same purpose. The results of the evaluation of the two platforms are compared to obtain an overall evaluation of Microsoft Teams.