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
Thank you for all your responses to the design survey. The survey is now closed.
1757 comments
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Anonymous
commented
Original feature request, Dec 2016. "Under Review" comment from Microsoft Admin, Feb, 13,2020. Still "Under Review" Feb 17, 2021!!!
19,500+ upvotes and 1700+ comments, why is this still not done? Teams users need this very basic feature found in many other collaboration tools. Does MS prefer we switch to something else instead?
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Víctor
commented
Please invest some effort in compact mode: it simply unacceptable that this item stays "Under Review" for a year.
Screen space is a valuable resource in corporate world, where multiple conversations are active simultaneously.
Skype was worse using screen space than Netmeeting, and Teams is even worse than Skype.
Please stop this trend, or your corporate customers will switch to the other existing collaboration tools. -
Emmanuel Preveraud
commented
@Andrew good luck with your plugin ! Don't hesitate to take css code or inspiration from https://userstyles.org/users/727497
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Joel
commented
>Alex (Teams Engineering, Microsoft Teams) responded · Feb 13, 2020
>Stay tuned here: We update our work items monthly -
Andrew Zhilin
commented
I am working on plugin for this issue, looking for beta-testers and new feature ideas! https://github.com/zhil/teams-plugin
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Alexandr
commented
Hi @Microsoft
Please add a setting to hide the preview of the last message in the Chats, so only the name of the chat is present -
lomelir
commented
In Feb. 2020, The teams engineers expressed they are working on the compact mode. I can't believe it takes a year to accomplish this. Is not in March 2021, when the Skype migration is set for to e completed?
Please send us a taste..... -
Matt Anderson
commented
Just don't compromise legibility, please.
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Steve Gauthier
commented
Sample collapse icon-only compact mode
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Steve Gauthier
commented
The current version seems to achieve most of what is being asked by simply resizing the window. That said, I think my biggest pet peeve is the chats/contact list overlay that disappears when you resize the window, and then pops over the chat when mouseing over/clicking the chat icon.
Personally, I'd rather the chats/contact list collapse into a persistent icon-only list so we can maintain a compact view that's much easier to navigate.
After this we can move on to improving the Channel Experience:
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Brian
commented
To add to the thousands of voices, this user experience is poor and makes the tool a hindrance instead of something that could be effective. This is low hanging fruit.
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Lexi Obara
commented
Teams takes up 2/3 of my screen. WAY too big. My company is ditching skype so I'm forced to use Teams but I'm losing out on the functions because I won't leave it running because it's obnoxiously large.
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Anonymous
commented
Completely agree. Terrible use of real estate
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Dave
commented
Develop the ability to have chat outside teams app, like Skype for business
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Jeff LaFleur
commented
Teams to way to large. It takes up too much space and means I am not able to keep it open and use it while doing other tasks. As a result, I just don't use it anymore and have gone back to email.
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Nathan Castle
commented
This doesn't seem like a particularly challenging design task, so I would personally like to see more progress here. I don't understand how it takes four years to reduce margins and padding, when I can do it in a few hours with very little in the way of modern web skills.
For anyone interested, I've attached a user style you can use with Stylus, other extensions to customize Teams. Mostly it makes things compact, but it also makes things like image preview much better (IMO). Feel free to use it as a starting point, or share your own modified version.
The part that's difficult for me to do with CSS alone is putting threads in a sidebar (like Slack), which is IMHO a much better use of space.
Can't attach, but you get the gist... https://gist.github.com/nCastle1/cbebc4ac6a3a8e81b26b377a115f89fd
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celia
commented
The overuse of screen real estate is not the only issue here either. I loathe one of the recent updates that makes focus on contact favorites lists impossible *favotie group titles do not stay collapsed. and the chat view is crazy.
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Nancy C
commented
I'd like if separate chats could be popped out into separate windows that are able to be sized, maximized and minimized in similar to the way they appear in Skype for Business.
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Anonymous
commented
Any updates on this feature Microsoft?
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J
commented
It seems we'll be forced to use teams in the near future within my corporation as well.
I tried to look into it and the chat-function is probably the worst experience I could imagine on a desktop computer.
The chat does not use the full width of the screen when it's on a full screen window and the bubble-style display (that you're usually used to on a phone screen, where it's fine) does not translate at all to a normal laptop or monitor screen.
The chat bubbles being on different sides of the screen does not help, either. It's hard to read this on a normal screen because if you want to keep track of a conversation, your eyes have to skip from left to right when skipping through messages.
Sadly, this is a problem that would also be even more prevalent if the app would use the whole size of the window it is in.
That this request is being neglected for so long is a real shame and I dread the day I will have to use teams instead of rocket.chat for my daily communication.
