Teams – ‘Hide’ is in the wrong spot

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.

Figure: Teams’ Delete Chat Feature

Help me quickly add the likely members of a new chat group

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.

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).

Help me find the advanced location to manage access

Hey Teams / SharePoint Team Product Owner,

I don’t think this UI is clear to users. I just did a quick poll and people that use this UI did not know about the 3 dots “…” (see red arrow)

Please change to a 3rd button that says “Manage” or “Manage Access” 

Figure: Bad UX – Who clicks these 3 dots?

It then brings open this …

Figure: Use the Share | Shared with | Manage access… – then users can get the correct link to give users

Teams Search – Help me find documents I have permissions to (BUG)

Teams search is super important, and I hope this one is on Microsoft’s backlog.

I expect Teams search and SharePoint search to have consistent results. Do others?

Not finding stuff you have permissions too is super frustrating. So this one has always confused me…. Do you consider it a bug?

Watch this one:

Figure: Teams and SharePoint Search Bug with Jean Thirion – YouTube (5 mins)

I think Jean did a great explanation of the permissions problem.


More info

This is really weird behaviour – fire up Fiddler and you can see what Teams is doing in the background. 

Turns out that when you search in Teams before it shows you what you have access to, it weirdly adds a refining query to only show documents from a list of every group you are a member of… 

Figure: This string of group id’s is about 75 items long, and I believe it is made up of every Team I am a member of… I’d like to turn this off
Figure: Query yields 1 result

When I remove that refining query, it works as expected:

Figure: In Fiddler when you edit the request and remove the group id refining query …it yielded 21 results

So I would say this appears to be a deliberate decision rather than a bug, though I think it is important to be able to turn it off if you want to find stuff using Team’s search 😂

In fact I would turn it off by default, so it is consistent with SharePoint Search

Allow me to open in desktop app

When creating a new document directly in Microsoft Teams, Teams always opens the web version of the Office app that you are asking for (e.g. Word).

Please add a checkbox for Teams for open in Desktop App instead.

Figure: Open in Desktop App checkbox here

Note: It even ignores the setting in Teams to always open in the Desktop app:

Figure: Teams ignores its own setting “Open in Desktop App” when creating a new file

Help me find the Team’s email address on the UI (not the channel’s)

When you create a Microsoft Team, the Team has an email address associated with it. However, there is no way to see this email address from within Teams.

Note: There are Channel email addresses that you can view, but these are different.

Microsoft Teams should show the Team email address on the UI – like it does in Outlook.

Figure: Team Channels have an email address that can be viewed from Teams ✔️
Figure: Missing – The Team also have an email address, but this cannot be seen ❌
Figure: This is useful – you can see the Team email address in Outlook | Left nav | Groups | Team name

Help me because the location of the attendees matter

Where your eyes are… matter.

Do you know about“Gallery at Top” (see image) – if you are not using it, try it. I’d love to know if you also think it is awesome ⭐

  1. Suggested option: “Keep the person talking in the center” … what do you do if 2 people are talking? Move both of them to the center….
    Basically I’d like the people who don’t talk off to the sides.
  2. Suggested option: “Keep people who have cameras on, in the center”
    Basically I’d like the people who don’t turn their cameras on, off to the sides
Figure: Move the people to the top with the option “Gallery at top”

PS: Maybe we all need a Surface Pro X.  😊

Watch the video: Surface Pro X – Ultra-thin & Always Connected 2-in-1 Laptop – Microsoft Surface

It is pretty subtle.

Help me see the status messages

Sometimes you see a message like this:

3 or more members are out of the office or have a status message

Unfortunately it is not immediately obvious where to read them. 

Currently you can open the top-right-hand pane, then from there hover over the people’s icons and see their status.

I have a suggestion that could remove this papercut by adding a button called “View” straight from the message we see.

Figure: “View” link opens panel

Have separated folders for a Team “chat” files and Team “project” files

Currently, any images or documents shared in a Team chat conversation will automatically be in the “Files” folder. These files are often temporary.

The “Files” folder should have only permanent files that are relevant to the project.

Figure: Bad example – Files with different purposes are mixed in the same folder (tab). In blue we see conversation images; in red we have the project files

We believe chat images should go into a separated “Conversations” folder, so we have 2 folders (tabs):

  • Conversations: files from chat (mostly temporary)
  • Files: files manually added as a resource to the project (mostly permanent)