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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.

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Thomas Nimstad shared this idea  ·   ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

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  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I'm joining the cacophony here. You sent me a note requesting feedback by March 9. I fit this into my list of priorities and attempted in good faith to respond before the deadline. Today is March 8, and I see that the survey is not currently active. This is not the way to treat your customers.

  • Jussi Halonen commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    >Sending survey's with a 9th of March deadline and then closing them on the 4th of March is quite unprofessional.

    Couldn't agree more, like spitting our face.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Sending survey's with a 9th of March deadline and then closing them on the 4th of March is quite unprofessional.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    After years of no activity in this thread I just got an email informing me about the survey.
    It states: The survey will be available until Tuesday, March 9th, 2021.

    However, when I click the link it's unavailable and the thread contains a message from admin that says: The survey is now closed.

    It's fascinating how unprofessionally Microsoft handles this situation. It's beyond my imagination how you guys can build even a half decent product with such an organizational chaos there. Oh wait..

  • Bram Mertens commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Alex: the survey reports: "Sorry, this survey is not currently active."
    Also the email notification from uservoice about your comment was quarantined by Office365 as a phishing email.

  • Bernard Vander Beken commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Hi Alex, I'm getting an error

    "Sorry, this survey is not currently active." even though it's still March 4th.

    And a different topic: when I login using the magic link on this uservoice, I receive a hard to read email in Outlook 365 (dark mode on Windows).

  • Nikki Charles commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I was unable to even see the survey, but I have to agree with the comments below. It’s not just about single elements being compact. The Skype window was perfect for chat. It also didn’t open in full screen mode for calls (which is wholly unnecessary). Maybe add an option in settings for the user to decide the scale of the user experience. I never need teams in full screen mode, except for meeting with video or presentations.

  • Fredrik Forséll commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Another survey, a few years after the last one that resulted in nothing. Well, I hope you're designers are lined up this time.

  • Michael Hofmann commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Yep, I have to agree with the previous comments: you're getting the survey wrong.

    I'm not going to repeat the descriptions of wasted whitespace made just below, but let me add another aspect to this: Teams should be a command center, not a toy. Users should be able to control how "compact" to make their layout instead of the program dictating how to use it.

    I don't care about single elements made more compact (hence I can't fill out the survey), but please let us use the existing space better, more flexibly, and thus more compactly.

    Example video call:
    - Let the user decide how big or small to make the participant videos at the bottom of the screen. Make them reorderable.
    - Let the user decide to be able to see *both* a large preview of the call videos as well as the shared screen, and let them decide where to put them (same window, same screen, different screens)
    - Let the user display attendees list and chat at the same time. Let them be flexibly dockable, resizable, etc.

    Example chats:
    - Let users decide whether chats should extend further horizotally or not.
    - Let users display multiple chats horizontally, vertically, in a grid, etc. Take inspiration from IDEs, vim, or tmux.

  • Wayne Hartell commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Have to agree with the last comment regarding mock ups or some kind of visual explanation of what is being proposed.

    My support for this feature was mostly (and still is) because I can maximize the Teams window on a monitor of 3840x2160 resolution and the chat window, whilst taking most of the screen, uses only a very narrow band in the centre with more than half the monitor width wasted. Even docked to the left side of the screen it's still got wasted space. Not sure why the chat can't just expand horizontally to fill the available space?

    Popped out chats are better (why do I have to pop them out to have them more space efficient?), but still don't use all available real estate when using the entire screen (however, they appear to use most of the available space when docked to half screen width).

    Are there any ex-WinForms designers on the team? They'll immediately see the problem(s). It's the very first thing you see when using the program for the first time.

    For the vertical use case, I'm chatting to someone; I can see their avatar, their name is also top left of screen, so why do I need to see their name in the chat, every single time they write something? That wastes vertical space. Couldn't that be a tool-tip if I really wanted to see it? Surely the reactions and/or timestamps would fit in the wide fields of un-utilized space to the left or right. For multiple person chats, having the user's name every single time might be defensible, but most chats tends to be one on one and the avatar seems to be a good enough indicator of who typed the message.

    The questions in the survey like "if it provided more space" seem confused; I don't want more space, I want the space that is there to be utilized better! Once horizontal space is used efficiently, vertical space usage will benefit.

    Overall though, I think after all this time I have gotten used to how incredibly space inefficient chat is, so I now just use Teams on a smaller screen now where the space inefficiencies aren't so comically obvious, and save my bigger screens for applications that are able to benefit from them. In some ways that's a positive since I still have a primary purpose for the smaller screen.

  • Wandering Idiot commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    With respect to the MS development Team: I applaud your efforts to gain a deeper understanding of the ask through a survey - but I think you may be doing it wrong. I was cruising through it until I reached the line of questioning which asked me which elements of Teams should be “compacted.”

    I strongly recommend that you spend a few days with the UX/UI designers to gen up some concept mock-ups of what possible variants on a compact mode could look like, and solicit votes from the community this way. Otherwise I think you run the risk of delivering a riding mower when perhaps the community really had a wheelbarrow in mind.

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