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."
I work in the China office, and we keep reverting to WeChat because it offers this feature which is super useful. It is missing from Teams.
I want to be able to forward a group of messages in my private chat with someone else not in the chat. This often happens when a problem comes up in the discussion and I realized I have already discussed a similar issue. Therefore, I want to share a section of my chat history to them quickly.
❌ My current workarounds: Option 1: Copy + paste the messages one by one to the other chat. Option 2: Take a long screenshot of the chat history and share the image.
✅ Suggestion: Allow people to cherry-pick messages in their chat and forward them in a bundle.
❌ Figure: I want to forward just the section in the red box to someone else (but I don’t want to share irrelevant information about my annual review)✅ Figure: WeChat lets me combine and forward selected messages
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)
❌ Figure: F11 key goes to Charts in Excel✅ Figure: Full screen in Edge with F11
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 Sizeand 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)
iOS seems to have a different problem
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.
More importantly the page’s content is pretty bad, i.e. it shows different sections and even different content compared to the mobile app.
Figure: This is the SharePoint “Home page” and it needs improving – make it consistent with 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??).
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)”.
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.
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.
Figure: I type ‘Gert’ it pops open people, if I pick ‘Bob’ it pops open the *same* people!
Suggestion
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).
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