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
This suggestion is still planned. I don’t have further updates on timing, but will share as we have them. Thanks.
1032 comments
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Ray
commented
Must a be joke: the survey contains nothing that has any bearing on the request.
It's the message view, S****D!!Ah well... Slack works fine.
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Emmanuel Preveraud
commented
The survey in the admin reply is 404, used the link provided in a comment.
Indeed, the questions are absolutely not relevant to this topic.So I'll continue to periodically promote my CSS customization for Dense and Compact view of chat published here: https://userstyles.org/users/727497
Not updated for a few months since it's working well enough for me day-to-day despite a few shortcomings, but difficult to improve with the current state of the html structure.
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Joshua Sleeper
commented
I echo the general opinion of the comments below. Almost every suggested improvement in the survey was extremely low value to me.
I called out a handful of improvements to the teams/channels list (since that was the focus of the survey) that I'd actually find useful, but admittedly the sidebar itself is basically a non-issue right now. It could always be better, but it's already good enough.
The biggest density offender by far is the actual message view. Makes terrible use of widescreen monitors, and has a ton of useless vertical whitespace on all monitors. I encourage the UI/UX team to take a serious look at how Slack organizes threaded replies and messages in general for a much more sane, compact presentation.
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Anonymous
commented
All of the padding and margins for every element need to be minimized, every thing needs to be streamlined for speed and ease of access with minimal additional clicks!!!!!
'pretty' and 'cool borders' don't matter and waste space, effects that cause additional loading time or menu's that 'slide' out or stupid things like this just WASTES TIME!!!!
Then there is the consistent issues with copy and paste while using the browser(because your 'app' just wastes ram), and the excessively slow loads when trying to scroll through history (why force a dynamic load on this when you can just send the last 5 days of chat history at the time the 'session' is loaded for that user/message thread)
We also need the option as end users to hide elements that are not needed and cause issues where the "get apps" and "store" buttons on the tool bar force the toolbar on options the left to shrink and require extra clicks to the ... button find "teams" and "meetings", and sometimes this breaks your mouse over features which are also annoying.
Zooming is another big one, If I use my browsers zoom out feature to make it easier to see more content on my screen/window, then the recent/contacts/chat rooms/etc toolbar gets in the way on the left since the page thinks that someone is using the app in fullscreen (WHO DOES THIS WHILE MULTITASKING?!?!)
ALL of this makes for a horrible experience trying to use something in a professional environment.
This is less than half of the issues I see with teams, the others include mouse over appearing menus getting in the way or not working, search issues, image loading/zooming/pasting issues, file attachment issues, text edit box issues, etc...
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Drew Hammond
commented
What the ****, Microsoft...
Are you guys really that tone-deaf? Nobody cares about how dense the teams/sidebar list is. Fix the chat layout. I should have read the survey questions about density more clearly. My answers were referring to the chat layout.
We can't get anyone to use the "Teams" functionality of Teams because of how bad it is, but all of our users use the "Chat" functionality daily because it's [more] dense and useful... This is not a coincidence.
I know you guys see the same trend in the telemetry data you collect so what's going on?
You are ignoring the obvious trying to differentiate your product from Slack and we hate it. There's a reason we all prefer Slack and it's really not because of the features. Slack is intuitive and Teams is clunky and terrible.
I don't even know why I still follow this thread
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Adam D. Walling
commented
Really frustrating survey focusing on the list of teams and channels rather than the actual content of the chats and discussions which is where the bloated layout is most painful. The list of teams and channels really isn't a problem.
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Kim the first
commented
This urgently needs to happen, Teams is unusable for me until this is fixed.
It is unbelievable that this has a 2016 date on it and it still isn't fixed - a few UI tweaks is all it would take, half an hours work for someone who knows the code. I am considering doing it myself with a webview.
MS have increasingly good ideas nowadays but you need to stay in touch with reality, do not alienate your traditional user base for the sake of innovation. That's what Blackberry did.
You are not hitting the right balance between your internal design agenda and organic user feedback (organic feedback =/= surveys).
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Anonymous
commented
Having just finished the survey I'll have to add my voice to all the rest.
Very disappointed that the survey didn't even mention the primary issue. While some changes to the channel list might be nice, who bloody cares when you can't read more than 5 messages at once?!Crafting a quick userstyle to alleviate most of the issues was dead simple, just take an afternoon and get it done.
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kricords
commented
I use the Teams application and the other popular chat tool. To me, the Teams application has missed the bar set by the competition. Teams is too many clicks (or clunky un-intuitive shortcuts) to get to what I want... In Teams I click 4 times to be able to chat (only 1 click on the other popular chat tool).Teams text layout of those conversations is poor at best, with a lot of noise.
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Anonymous
commented
Just submitted the survey... incredibly frustrating how tone-deaf Microsoft continues to be about this issue.
The whole time I was taking the survey, I was thinking: "JUST GIVE US A COMPACT CHAT LAYOUT".
NONE of the things listed in the survey were more important than the chat layout for me.
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Anonymous
commented
I got a survey for this issue last night. I am a bit concerned that the items on the survey had nothing to do with the chatroom information density.
This feedback item is in regards to the way chat rooms are displayed, ***not*** the sidebar.
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Anonymous
commented
I hope MS take notice of the comments regarding the survey. The issue is with the chat layout, not teams and channels.
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Gaute Lund
commented
I answered the survey also. It's a travesty, only focusing on nitty gritty details of the channel/teams list, which is NOT the problem. The problem is the godawful layout of the messages and also threads. Horrendous. Hard to navigate if there is a little traffic (of course, as long as it sucks worse than a black hole, we never see much traffic, but hey, IF....) and extremely space wasting bloated as explained here hundreds of times.
Apparently there was a post here to the forum with the survey, and it was taken down after a few hours. You can go here and endure it's stupidity, and at the end you get the chance to write FORGET THE CHANNEL/TEAM LIST! FIX THE F**KING CHAT LAYOUT ALREADY!!!
: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=v4j5cvGGr0GRqy180BHbR7hW7rKdVrVInUSM809cvrtUNFhLRVNJVVhaUFI0WEJHVTA4MlpGWVZUSS4u -
Mark Jones
commented
the ability to reply to a specific comment in a chat would be useful. this can be done in a team but not a direct chat
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Anonymous
commented
I agree with the sentiment expressed by others: The chat needs cleaning up, not the teams/channel list.
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Olivier Jacques
commented
A survey was issued, and I answered it. But I am very concerned that there is a misunderstanding. The survey only mentions a compact mode for teams / channels list. That is not the biggest issue.
-> We need a compact mode for the messages.
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Anonymous
commented
Why still planned? As a simple step how hard is it to trim out some blank space? More than two years later and we're still waiting.
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Anonymous
commented
I responded to your survey and I was also wondering why all the questions about sidenav and none about the real issue: 6 messages and chat needs scrolling.
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Anonymous
commented
Please also take a "Teams Calling Compact Mode" into consideration for a compact mode view.
There are still some users at customers (in Germany) who'd like to go for or already have Teams (Calling) but need not the complete rich feature client view but a view to make (pstn) calls quickly or change their call settings quickly (e.g. call forwarding, call device …). This would help my customers to adopt Teams telephony faster especially if the respective customer strives to replace his legacy PBX.
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Anonymous
commented
I responded to your survey - but howcome there was nothing in there about what THIS feature request is about "Compact mode in CHAT" - the survey included features for teams and channel compactness, but nothing on CHAT - which is the KEY issue still?