Make "Teams" and "Chat" the same Tab
There is no reason that Teams and Chat should be different top level categories in the left navigation. They are the same thing, perform exactly the same function, and making two different items simply confuses the navigation and makes badge notifications and discoverability much more difficult to use.
Please combine Chats into the Teams tab so that you can browse all conversations in one place rather than needing to navigate to different tabs to see different conversations.
Chats and channels perform essentially the same function, which is talk to some people and collaborate. Forcing the user to check two different lists to see if somebody is messaging them is a really bad experience, it is like having two different chat apps.
This is one usability issues that makes Teams less usable for collaboration than both Slack and Skype.
Samuel Sze
shared this idea
This feature is still being reviewed by the feature team. No decision has been made yet. I’ll keep you posted.
-Warren
356 comments
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Sævar
commented
No!
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Amy
commented
This request points up a rather more serious problem. The UI is EXTREMELY confusing and it is EXTREMELY difficult to understand the difference between Teams, Channels and Chats and to understand when you should use which one. Combine that with the general clutter (news flash, I don't need a log of every chat message I have ever exchanged with a user when I try to send them something) and it is more than understandable that MS Teams is a tool for annoyance more than communication.
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Joe Henry
commented
A) Not all conversations happen in a Team
B) The Activity function will tell you if you have a reply regardless of where it is.I think what you really want is the option to turn off chat at the enterprise level - however this would force you to host every video meeting in a public channel and I cant imagine you would want that!
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Anonymous
commented
I also disagree with this. For finding a previous groupchat or private chat, I am very happy to have the CHAT menu available. Not all chats are held in a Team.
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Lee
commented
I agree with this. The issue I find with my company is that we use one Team and then have a "Team Chat" going which is a group chat with all 10 of us in there. Then we use Teams to chat 1:1 and IM. The problem is because Chat and Teams are different tabs, my users NEVER go to the Teams tab. I'll have them share their screen to help them with something and it will show like 57 notifications on the Teams tab because they just don't use it. Having them be combined would probably be a lot easier.
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Andre
commented
Maybe you could add a combined view for my pinned channels and pinned chats. Currently I have to switch all day long between Chat and Teams to see what on.
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Ryan Goldsworthy
commented
I disagree with this
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Michael Tremblay
commented
Please don't merge the two together. Combining the two would make this horrible.
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Stephanie Casertano
commented
I disagree with this entirely! It makes sense to potentially add "team" chats to the chat window, but you can have chats with individuals or multiple people without having to be in a team. Teams include the ability to chat and also just post updates, files, calendars, other apps, etc. They are separate!
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Safi Ullah Azeem
commented
I completely disagree with it!
You should make it configurable so that everyone can configure it according to their requirements.
For me they both are fine as separate and should not be combined. -
Matt Petermann
commented
Don't do this
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Zuming Aldertime
commented
Teams and Chat are fine as separate tabs, but I would replace the noisy cluttered Activity tab with a Pinned and Recent channels tab that consolidates these from the Teams and Chat tabs.
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Matt
commented
Completely disagree. How can I vote against/downvote this?
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Jim
commented
I would suggest adding a chat tab into each channel in a team.
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Ramon Espinosa
commented
I think there's some misunderstanding by some about what the ask is. I don't believe the ask is to combine them, but rather have all them all show up under activity, but still keep them separate. When you are in a chat and someone "like's" a comment or "@"'s you or a group, you get a notification in Activity, so you have to click out of the chat or thread and into activity to see that. So all new "chat" related notifications should show in the Activities feed where essentially you can just park there for anything current and not bounce between a chat or a thread. At least this is how I view this request.
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Aaron Viviano
commented
Please keep these separate. Chat and team threads have different purposes.
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Chris Kershaw
commented
Please do NOT combine these.
In our organization we view chats as transitory (30 day retention) where are conversations are records (kept for the life of that Group +5 years).
Team conversations are formal, worth saving, referable later and subject to public access just like emails. It's easier to create subject, keep threads, search later. We use this as our Knowledge Management for team members that enter later (new hires) to see history of discussion and decisions.
Chat's are informal, include emoji's and GIF's and more private, disposable discussions. If chat's are deleted, nobody cares. IF there was something important decided then it would be transferred into the conversation.
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Anonymous
commented
Please do. It's terribly annoying and a common complaint at work.
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Dev
commented
My vote is against this too. And I imagine the architecture behind it all is also different in a lot of ways. I can't see how this would work in a way that would not drive me crazy. What do we do, mix my teams and channels with random chat people I've got going on? Where do you put all those chats in the left navigation? The whole thing works very differently and combining them sounds like a nightmare to work with.
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Juan Bonfante
commented
The splitting of these tabs, adds a large amount of cognitive load, essentially forcing a user to choose between trying to remember every person they are having a chat with, or every chat in every team they are a part of. Overall this is caused by the difference in implementation of UI/Design elements between Chat & Teams - views, sticking to one or the other would be ideal:
1) Sidebar/Side Panel iconography and typography are inconsistent (multi vs single line buttons, margins & padding, etc). Along with the usage (UX) of the collapsible panels (accordion UX) is utilized in one view much more than the other.
2) Main/Content View Area/Panel. The way that the individual conversation container background box element, stretches to the horizontal edges (w/margins) in the Teams view, creating a more consistent look and feel. While it is jarring with the iMessage-like implementation in the Chat view, that has a more `chat bubbles` look & feel.
Add on top of that "Activity" notifications that say things like:
`Xyz person mentioned General in General....` (which General?)
and no real way to keep track of Threads, makes it frustratingly difficult to feel as if a user can be "on top of things" and instead tends to create confusion amongst which avenues of communication are currently active and paid attention to.
Outside of that I like the job you've done with Teams, it has come along way, and I'm glad to see it is improving.