Compact mode
I really like Teams. I do. But the current chat layout is not suited for professional chats. It's way to space consuming. It looks like something imported from MSN with smiley's that take half of the screen. I would say that Slack have nailed it because they focused on the ability keeping a tight window with lots of chat text visible. In Teams the window is full and starts scrolling after like 10 sentences.
Thomas Nimstad
shared this idea
We are working on a design with more density in mind. Until this design is solidified we are putting this item back to Under Review.
1599 comments
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Marco
commented
Can we get an update on this feature or at least an idea on what's being implemented/reviewed? It has been really a long time to get any friction on this.
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MrMan
commented
Good news is that after moving to slack waiting for this, slack allows you to change the width of the left nav and right side bar. That only took them 4 years, but at least they did it.
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MrMan
commented
I still cannot believe absolutely not a single thing has been done on this.
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Ulf
commented
3,5 years and always (until very recently) in the top 5 of asks and we haven't gotten anywhere?!? Please, pretty please, we have to improve to be able to make better use of Teams as the first thing everybody sees is the chat UI and it's not good.
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Luis Garcia
commented
Haven't checked this for a year. I can't believe this hasn't been implemented yet after 3.5 years of feedback. Unreal. We are still using slack waiting for this nonsense. STILL WAITING X 3000
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B
commented
Can Compact List in Teams be made:
- and option which, once chosen, will stick and not be forgotten every session,
- a selectable default for all channels. -
Eric Verduci
commented
The UI becomes a bit more practical with one stop of zooming out (to 85%). Ctrl+[-]
Still, I'd love a return to more data dense apps. For something that I--and I suspect most people--are using on a monitor for at least 5 hours per day, the white-space is a waste.
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THOMAS VARGHESE commented
The left sidebar is taking too much space for no reason, within the Chat window there is a huge margin before the conversations.
Hope they adopt how SKYPE is quite linear in this feature
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Mary Ellen Arbuckle
commented
I so agree. I love Teams but as for chat function it's deficient. That's the one user experience that significantly downgrades my experience on Teams. A compact chat window, small footprint similar to the Skype console's footprint, would be way more effective and greatly improve the Teams experience.
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Emmanuel Preveraud
commented
CSS style sheet for compact mode in the browser can be found at https://userstyles.org/users/727497 (when the website works), they may require a browser extension to load. They were developed for a previous version of Teams but have not been maintained with recent changes (for example the emoji reactions to a post).
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Michal Vašut commented
Please make Teams in similar manner as VSCode = really minimal (good for nothing) comunicator with huge collection of addons and option to configure everything, so everybody can make it suitable for himself. Fitting lot of things into software with preset (unchangeable) cofiguration is old way of thinking - customization is present and future.
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Sean Ellis
commented
@Chris - "Basic UI failure"
Unfortunately, it's easy to believe that this is the Teams UX mission statement.
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Sean Ellis
commented
@Stephen - The CSS style sheet fix is something that at least 3 people here (including me) have prototyped on the Web interface. I spent a long lunchtime on it and got it 80% functional. Another user (sorry! can't remember your name!) spent a weekend and got it 100% functional.
OK, so these are protoypes. Let's be really, really generous and assume that a fully tested, integrated, designed, nice version would take 100x as long. Two hundred days of effort. (I've seen the CSS that Teams produces. It could be that long.) That's approximately 1 person-year of work.
A single person, working 1% as fast as the users on this forum, would have completed the task in one third of the elapsed time that this has been in "working on it" state.
So the problem is clearly not the developers. I am sure that they would have homed in on the requirements, produced a design, implemented it, tested it, and deployed it by now. And been rightly proud of making the program easier to use for a significant proportion of its users.
The problem has to be marketing. Despite this being a mode, which would be "off" by default, there has to be someone somewhere saying that this doesn't "look as nice" as the existing chat interface that we currently have, so it will "put people off".
Despite it doing the exact opposite. Over 16000 people want a compact mode.
And it doesn't muck up the cover shots - the existing interface should not be going away. Lots of people like it, and that's fine. As we've said over and over, a "slightly more compact" default view won't cut it. It has to be a maximally-compact mode. So you can leave the existing interface completely alone.
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Kyle Kirbatski commented
Move the sub headline in pinned channels to be part of the channel name, add a / between the team and the channel. Remove the icon, remove the extra padding and margins. Remove the icons from the Teams section. Remove the padding and margins. Done.
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Stephen
commented
3.5 years later and a compact mode for Teams is still under review.
Pretty much see a Microsoft response every 3 months just to keep this issue from escalating on someone's watch queue.
Simple solution just like other HTML products, provide a CSS style sheet with compact mode and a switch in the settings to use that CSS style sheet.
Microsoft's response to date is,
evaluating it,
working on it,
it may work maybe with a settings switch,
no, lets back off
...A guess is that there will either be a reskinned user interface or a full replacement product called "Teams 2" whereby Microsoft jettisons all of the legacy code bugs, legacy requests and
starts this pointless bug report, feature request cycle all over again.
Strategy:
- Release product
- Provide some fixes
- If it does not make large money, do critical fixes sometimes to drive away users
- If it makes large money, add tiny micro-features around the edges
- Respond to bug reports and feature requests with ' good idea, lets look at it, in the backlog' and other deferral lines
- Work on a replacement product which is incompatible with existing product
- Release replacement product, stop spending anything on forward development of existing product
- Wait 1 year, state that the new product is winning market share and the old product is being retired at some point in the future- Only work on the new product
The new product will be treated the same.
- repeat this cycle every 6 years -
Cheaper than having legacy systems with 10 year lifespans
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Anonymous
commented
we've just moved to Teams from Skype. Skype was lean and efficient, Teams seems bloated
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Chris
commented
Yeah, this interface is just... clunky. Simple? yes..
But the purpose is to communicate clearly with team members. The odd, limited/fixed message width and all the empty space surrounding the channel lists & message areas is just really inefficient.
From a developer perspective, coming from Slack, the code-snippets is just awkward. Instead of making code/SQL/formatted-text easier to read (the whole purpose), it condenses it into this little box you have to scroll around in. Basic UI failure IMO...
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Sean Ellis
commented
Another 5 months on... how's the review going?
Can you share a sketch of the design?
Can you share a sketch of any of the designs you said were completed during the 3 years you were "working on it"?
Can you give an ETA? Users prototyped this in a weekend.
Can you give any evidence that this is actually being progressed at all?
Can you give us any evidence that you actually understand the requirements? -
T
commented
Hate being discriminated as a second class citizen by using a laptop for a product which obviously is designed for small screen phones first without actual work on large screen laptop design.
Everyone at my large company uses Teams on a laptop sized screen or higher and rarely, if ever, uses it on a phone for anything other than SMS text message complexity.
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Daniel Merritt
commented
Pretty sick of Teams for chat and making calls. Love my S4B and the compactness on the screen. Tired of seeing very old chats when I bring up someone. I know teams is the future, but it's a step backward in efficiency. Even having 2 or 3 screens, the app is just to cumbersome. Great for multiple video calls, but most of my chatting is quick hitting and I want to see who is available in a list not every contact card. Give us compact, short and sweet to the point as an option. Just too much resizing and scrolling around to find what I want.