Help me read the comments for “Other” easily

When you have 6 options like this, and one is “Other”, the users will type answers and then you want to read them. The problem is if, in the answers, you don’t give numbers or letters for each choice…

Figure: There are 7 users who selected “Other”
Figure: Which one is “Other”? A better UI would have #13 highlighted in yellow or in italic, so you easily know that answer was manually typed. A prefix “Other – ” could also do the job

Tip: To avoid this problem and make it easier than find the others add “1. 2. 3 etc” or “A, B, C, etc” See Rules to Better Microsoft Forms

Help me know what resources a client has access to

Inside SSW, we have added a lot of clients into the Teams team. On the downside, you start seeing a lot of names you don’t know.

Suggestion: 
John is a client and a person I don’t really know. It took me a long time to know what he has access to here at SSW.

On this popup window it would be nice if you show something like this:

John has access to:

  • 1 team
  • 1 DevOps project
  • 2 invoices (via an extensibility point)
Figure: Suggestion – Add a 5th icon here “Activity”  (this would enable the user to learn more about what John has access to)
Figure: On this 3rd tab Activity, please add what John has access to

Advise when the contacted person is busy

When I message someone and don’t pay attention to their status (Busy, In a call, Presenting, etc.) I want the Teams Bot/App to reply with something like:

Adam Cogan is currently in a call and may not be notified of your message. If it is urgent, please click here to send the notification now.

This will be a useful feature so that we are made aware of the recipient’s status before we start pinging them continuously.

Slack has this already implemented with its DND (Do Not Disturb) feature. Link to example: Knock, knock: Introducing Do Not Disturb

Figure: Example image from Slack blog showing their DND feature

Help me easily see the form I work on each week

You know I love Microsoft Teams – I use it every week.

1. Are you going to be doing many changes to this view (I don’t enjoy using it a lot)

2. I am baffled when I see all these groups (when I have never used them)…. can you give the user the ability to remove them? (Even better dont show them if they are 0)

3. The group I use every week never shows up… I expect it to be #1 based on usage… so it kind of seems like a bug to me.

Figure: Sadly Recent Group Forms just shows me junk

Navigation – Help me know where I am

I click a link (sadly an unreadable link):

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/file/946926A6-F818-4208-9CFE-0D74BBC96619?tenantId=ac2f7c34-b935-48e9-abdc-11e5d4fcb2b0&fileType=xlsx&objectUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fsswcom.sharepoint.com%2Fsites%2FBrisbaneRetreat2020%2FShared%20Documents%2FGeneral%2FBrisbane-%20Retreat-2020-Attendance.xlsx&baseUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fsswcom.sharepoint.com%2Fsites%2FBrisbaneRetreat2020&serviceName=teams&threadId=19:27c127ee866b495e9a42775b66be92b9@thread.skype&groupId=fb84bba4-1504-4c82-96e5-ab938868ad2b

And I go here.

Suggestions:

  1. Where am I? Can you please add a breadcrumb that takes me to the team that this file belongs to (see red arrow)
  2. The ‘Close’ button should be renamed to ‘Cancel’ because it takes you back to where you were eg. the last chat
Figure: The navigation is missing