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.
479 comments
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Erich Wilgenbus
commented
Switching tabs to follow active communication is a huge pain in the **** and A LOT of clicks to your day! Also, my *teams* are "refusing" to use channels in a meaningful way due to this reason. It's a big argument for slack uptake!
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Mike Lee
commented
I totally agree with this. Having Chat and Teams as separate tabs is the biggest design flaw on Teams. They should be combined in the same view like how it is in Slack. With the teams I work with, the this is the biggest impediment to getting team members to adopt the use of Channels. People are used to chats from Skype and resist using channels because it's in a different tab and they either miss the messages or can't be bothered to switch between the tabs. So they create group chats instead and never use channels even though channels would be more advantage for collaboration. I've used Slack extensively before and my teams would always use channels on that platform, but it's because channels and 1-on-1 chats are in the same view. Microsoft just needs to copy this from Slack.
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James Montalvo
commented
Desktop apps should definitely allow you to show channels in the "chat" sidebar. Use of channels is so much less effective without this.
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Blare Sutton
commented
Four years, 475 comments and 3,419 votes.
Please, Teams "Posts" is where collaboration goes to die. Poorly handled notifications, clunky UI, it's like using a messageboard from the 90's. Please, please address this.
Option 1 - Add the ability to have a "Chat" tab and ability to make it the default tab for a Teams channel.
Option 2 - Replace "Posts" with Chat
Option 3 - Completely remove the "Chat" menu item and simply have each of your Teams Channels on the navigation menu.
This UI is killing effective collaboration with Teams Channels.
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Bill Moore
commented
Having used both Slack and Cliq for for one on one or team chats, Teams is so inefficient with having to click on two separate buttons that render the same exact functionality: chat.
Microsoft, we promise we can handle all of our chats being in a single area where we can quickly click on individual or team chats and respond accordingly. I hope Microsoft is listening and will get this implemented ASAP.
Also related to this, we need the ability to reply to specific threads in one on one chat and kept them in context as it is not unusual to have a few topics being discussed at the same time in a one on one chat session, like you can in a Teams channel. Need an example of how this works? Check out Zoho Cliq or Slack's setup for thread replies. It works and works very well and keeps it altogether for coherent conversations.
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Thomas
commented
Please, please, please do this. It is a user interface disaster as things stand. Also, make it possible to pop out meeting chats, even if you are not currently dialed into that call - many of us use meeting chats as chat rooms, since they offer scheduling features that other kinds of chat/team don't
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Anonymous
commented
Would love it if they are combined. It is so easy to miss messages with them separated!
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Viaj
commented
If you do implement this, ensure you allow users to toggle this behaviour. Personally, this would make an already crowded pane even worse.
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Michael Hill
commented
Would really like to see this. Far too easy for messages to get lost otherwise. Seems that most other chat clients support this feature, so plenty of examples should exist.
We are historically a primarily "Chat"-based group and are trying to transition to channels in order to provide public forums for specific business areas. Keeping the "Chat" and "Teams" areas separate raises the UX barrier for this transition. We would like to see a single scrollable pane which includes all chats and channels.
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Paul
commented
My company is split between Webex Teams and MS Teams so I need to run both in order to communicate with everyone. I'm much more likely to miss messages from people in MS Teams because of this issue. I just don't notice that someone has sent me a message until hours or days later. I know some people have noticed that if they send me a message in MS Teams and I don't respond they can send me the same message in Webex Teams and I'll notice their message and reply right away.
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Anonymous
commented
I like the ability to show pinned channels in the chat section (this is on the mobile app). But I disagree with combining chats & teams. They serve two completely different functions. And if you're apart of multiple teams in your company - then the merging of the two would be crazy difficult to manage. I can see it now ...
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Waylon Covil
commented
Or create a Posts Icon which aggregates all of the Posts in Teams Channels.
That way, the one to one and meeting chats are in chats, and users can simply go to the Posts icon to see their Posts from the Teams Channels. -
Esbjörn Larsen
commented
This must be fixed. We can't make use of chats in our organization because of this annoyance. We teach our users to avoid chats at ALL COST. Whoever designed Teams must have had a really bad day to separate these.
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kurlywhirlygurly
commented
I agree with everyone! this is so painful to have them split that I pine for Webex chat (ack!) PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE merge these two. there is absolutely no reason to them separated.
maybe even if it's just a setting or option for some users...?
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Allen
commented
please address this - messages in teams get lost. there's no reason to have both instead of just nesting chats under the teams
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Anonymous
commented
This is the most painful thing of using Microsoft team.
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[Deleted User]
commented
This is one of the largest pains of using Teams coming from Slack. The need to go back and forth between Teams and Chats makes it really annoying to check for new messages, where in Slack everything was organized in one view.
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Scott
commented
as pointed out by others, simply replicating the mobile functionality of allowing pinned chats and channels in the same place would be a significant enhancement.
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Jim
commented
Being able to add a chat tab to the top of any channel that includes all those in the channel would be helpful
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Ali
commented
Please move forward with this feature! Also please allow us to pin more than 15 chats!