Do you agree that products always have room for improvement?
"Every day there are little things in software that we find annoying. Some write books about it, like Annoyances.org, but I thought this site would be more constructive.
BetterSoftwareSuggestions.com is proudly maintained by myself and the developers at SSW."
- Adam Cogan 
When screen sharing in Teams or other applications, you want to be able to reduce noise as much as possible. One way to do this is by using full screen mode.
✅ Chrome – F11 works
✅ Edge – F11 works
❌ Outlook new email – F11 doesn’t work (does nothing)
❌ Word – F11 doesn’t work (does nothing)
❌ Excel – F11 doesn’t work (goes to Charts)
Today I showed at NDC Oslo how to build a bot manually with C# and Blazor using the Azure OpenAI GPT services.
Then I showed how to do the same thing automatically with the new PVAs.
At the end I did a poll of the audience (about 300 people) – the Norwegians vote was about 80% saying they preferred the PVA solution.
Well done – the 1st impression is awesome ⭐
Keep the $ attainable please… it is the danger point for adoption.
Little UX suggestion… Regarding this “Tracing Mode” screen.
I reckon I would rename it to “Query Execution Plan” or maybe just “Execution Plan”
Then you keep the same name as you have in SQL Server:
There are accessibility problems.
E.g. I am having some of the 50 year olds in SSW reporting that they cannot even use the SharePoint app.
Reason – they can’t read anything!
Suggestion #1: below
Suggestion #2: below
Note: it is not only the SharePoint app
❌ Same issue on the Dynamics app
✅ The Teams app has fixed this issue
✅ The Outlook app has fixed this issue
Figure: Android default is too hard to read for some.
Suggestion #1: Fix this accessibility problem by adding pinch to zoom (users expect the same as the web page)
Figure: Android Settings
Suggestion #2 – add a Cogs button that would take the user to Settings | Font Size and Style where they can increase the system font size! People don’t want to use this setting because it changes everything on your phone.
Figure: Android after increasing the size on Settings
Suggestion #2 is magic UX – see it is broadly fixed (❌ the top “News” is weird)
Figure: iOS normal view
Figure: iOS accessibility settings
Figure: ❌ Broken – Nothing increased except for the Search box (which is overlapping)
There are a couple things that frustrate me about SharePoint News. I believe that Microsoft Forms results should be shown in SharePoint news. By fixing this, SharePoint news will be more useful.
I see 2 problems:
❌ SharePoint News is not used a lot in most companies I work with
❌ Not many people in a company know when is the right time to read a Forms survey results…. Or even that you can.
Suggestion:
✅ When you are looking through the results of a Microsoft form, it would be great if there was an easy option to show the results in SharePoint News.
✅✅ Even better would be a way that the Form owner who reviews the comments, could add their own commentary to give context, before the others get to read them.
I use the browser for SharePoint a lot but love the SharePoint Mobile app more.
The initial experience is very different and it should be the same. The mobile app is better, and the start screen could be even better.
At the moment on my mobile, under the “find” tab, we see 4 groups:
#1 Suggestion for Mobile app – Make sections consistent and change from 4 groups to 6 groups
I want to see what I am using, and what the rest of the company is using, therefore I’d love to see this:
#2 Suggestion for Web app – Make SharePoint WebApp Start Page consistent
This is the first experience when people reach an intranet home – everyone clicks that 🏠home icon (see red arrow).
Many users first notice the horrible URL, e.g. https://sswcom.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/sharepoint.aspx
More importantly the page’s content is pretty bad, i.e. it shows different sections and even different content compared to the mobile app.
I would love to see the same categories described above in Suggestion #1 (i.e. Sites, People, then Files).
In short, the content should be the same – whether I use the browser or mobile app
(e.g. today even just the Frequent Sites I see on the browser and on the mobile app are different – how??).
Cheers,
I am not sure if this is an edge case…. I’d love to know how others work.
On some calls – for example a managers meeting – you want to temporarily add in someone just for a quick question. You don’t want them to remain after the call. It is kind of a security or privacy issue if you don’t remove them.
So I find it really annoying when I forgot to remove them after the call and they probably find it annoying when they get our messages after the call. So I would prefer not to have to remove the person manually.
Suggestion – next to “Add people”, I think it would be really cool to add a person via an option “Add people (temporarily)”.
Cool suggestion?
Little Suggestion:
We have a new feature “Delete” a chat. I’d love to know if people will use it.
I’m not sure I will use it as I like history in chats, but I regularly use ‘Hide” to remove a chat conversation (I am always aiming for a 0 inbox and a 0 chat list).
On the right click menu, notice the last 2 are about getting rid of a chat…. And so is “Hide” chat. Therefore it is in the wrong place.
Please can you move “Hide” with the bottom 2 menu items. Those 3 are related.
I have another fantastic idea 😊
We all love Microsoft Teams and I think this UI looks like it is about to be clever, but it is not.
When starting a new chat…
If I pick 1 person… please attempt to guess the 2nd person I will add to the chat.
People are often related and I know it would be a nice for all Microsoft Teams users if the people picker showed the like people that I will chat with together.
Today, it doesn’t matter who I pick first in the chat, the search always shows the same people.
Please pick who I will probably pick next … it should change the people based on who I am adding.
More info:
Delve tells me who I talk to a bit, that would be ok.
But when you talk to a manager, you probably are going to pick another manager.
When I talk to an Azure DevOps engineer, I am probably going to pick another Azure engineer (not a React developer).
I often use Emojis in email subjects to signify certain things a warning ⚠️ or a bug 🐛
In Outlook search, why can’t I search for an emoji?
Curious… I’d love to know the technical reason, as I would have expected this to work without any additional effort.
Let’s add some emoji love to search.
I liked the idea of Outlook giving me time to do work without interruption. All these little appointments appeared in my calendar and I was going to focus and get work done.
Clearly I was dreaming. Does anyone successfully use the auto created appointments “Focus time”?
> Microsoft Viva Insights has scheduled your focus time in accordance with your focus plan and work week settings.
> To edit your settings, visit your settings page at Protect Time Settings.
In an Outlook appointment, when I decide to click this link, I expected to see a button “Delete” or “Unsubscribe”
When using this people don’t think of it as a “Plan”… I reckon they think of it as a recurring appointment.
So testing it out, I click “Get Started”…
I am just looking, I should be able to click “Cancel”… I did not know what “Leave Plan” was about.
Also popping up these questions should only happen after I have been using it for more than 24 hours.
