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
The team has not made a decision on whether to move forward with this feature. We will update when we have new status to share.
437 comments
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Aditya Prasad
commented
I think a Home/Main screen that allows us to have a list of pinned/chosen (and maybe add in recently used conversations) Chats, Channels and Threads would be more beneficial. The Activity screen doesn't so much for me - I'd be more than happy if that was replaced or if this choice were configurable.
I am not sure if I want all chats and Channels to be on the same pane, the amount of information could be a lot to handle. -
Rene Horn
commented
Nobody in my organization goes into the Teams tab because we all have too many chats, especially with individuals, that we have to respond to, and so we have tons of ad-hoc, but permanent chat rooms in the Chats tab because if we stay in the Teams tab, we'll likely miss a response in a chat room. It's dumb because Teams chats have more capabilities (including threads) that just regular chats don't have.
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Sebastian Oort
commented
I disagree. I have chats with my students and colleagues all day, and i have my teams for my lessons and big stuff. Having the chats in the same list would really mess up my sense of urgency and direction during my workday.
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Burl Johnson
commented
Yes please make this happen! We end up making more chat groups than teams and messages sent in a team can be missed.
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Brandon
commented
My preference would be a new tab that lists only pinned chats AND channels
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Zoltán Sághy
commented
I think this was deliberate in the initial design but Teams have come a long way since then. I find it very frustrating toggling between scrum team mates, community of practice teams, individuals, etc.
Simple ux problem: I want to be able to switch conversation with only one mouse click or hotkey. Also I want to see every chat notifications in aa single tab.
Also I want to pin team channels and chats and see them in one place.If you are not sure about the change then please make it optional. The company recently switched to Teams and many people have hard time using it after simpler apps like Slack, Discord, Skype, etc...
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Michael Owiesny
commented
This needs to be optional if the change is made. We chat very often with colleagues not associated with a Team. We are a large corporation that has many Teams. I don't want to add a Team to just chat with someone that has a question.
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Jeff
commented
The problem with the Chat panel is that it's fundamentally misdesigned by being oriented around the participants. It needs to be designed like email, around the concept of the 'conversation' - manage, store and organize conversations. It needs to be email but with a chat backend.
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Angie
commented
THis is the most annoying thing ever - MS teams neither allows
1) previewing content for incoming messages so you HAVE to click into the application,
2) combine "teams" (think, group chat" and "chats" (individual or ad hoc chats)so you have to click through several godforsaken rooms before finding the active chat.
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Daniel R
commented
I find that I'm having to switch between the teams and chat tab about six hundred times a day, depending on the activity rate of chat correspondents vs. team members. It would be really useful to me to have chats and teams on the same screen.
Having a user setting to enable the merged view would be fine, so that users who prefer the separate tabs can keep the display the way they prefer.
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Tim Wilson commented
Teams is unusable for any power users who want to productive (ex: developers) without this feature implemented.
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Anonymous
commented
This might be a nice idea for smaller companies where people only have 5-10 conversations, but this would absolutely destroy Teams in an enterprise environment. Anecdotal, but I am required to reach out to dozens of people in multiple departments on a 1x1 basis per day (think a help desk position, but for a large company). Should I really be expected to add every single person in the company to a single team so I can talk to each of them individually? Should every one of the thousands of employees be on the same team channel? Imagine that chaos!
If you somehow decide to implement this feature, I would ask that you make this optional and/or put a user limit on this feature, because forcing this change on any company with a large number of employess would make teams entirely useless.
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Marta Weber
commented
I agree with this being a GREAT optional feature. Individual chats are fine in the chat tab however, I have a group chat with my team members that was started before our team was up and running in full. Now, instead of them working within the team and commenting on items in the team, they are commenting in the chat still and it is extremely confusing. The ability to drag and drop a chat (including the history) into the team would be very beneficial to relocating a chat when it would make the workflow more efficient and effective.
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Anonymous
commented
If this is implemented, it should be an option not a forced change for everyone. I prefer to keep them separate, but I can certainly see why some want to keep them together. It's just now how I work.
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Paul B
commented
It would great to make this an optional feature for customers.
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Anonymous
commented
please do not merge them. this will create so much chaos. it is very nice the way it is.
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Andrea Cassioli
commented
This is a must to be productive.
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Dave
commented
I disagree that they are the same function, but it is is giant PITA to have multiple active chats on 2 different tabs. IF you can't combine the two together, a UI tweak to make it easier to monitor chats between the two tabs would be awesome. Maybe an activities tab that was useful for more than finding when you've been called out on a group chat you ignore (just so I can make the notification go away)?
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Nathan
commented
Completely agree on combining Chat and Team threads into one tab. This is a major gap WRT to Slack. It's very inefficient and annoying to have to frequently toggle back and forth.
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Nathan Evans
commented
The request above is an actual solution. And I probably agree with the solution though I'd probably indicate if it is a team or chat (I'm in Product/UX myself). But really the following problems need to be solved.
1. Missing a chat because it was done on a thread that's buried in teams.
2. Notifications for teams messages not clearly showing incoming chats, items that need a quick response, etc. I spend most of my day in chat and have ended up moving away from actually using the teams portion because of this. We now just create a large chat to support those.
3. Because of 1, people don't post to those teams. This creates more chat threads that really could be consolidated.