MicrosoftI'm a user of outlook since the 1990's.
Peak outlook was around about the Office 2010 version, which I still use at home. The recent changes in Office365 seem to be all form over substance - fiddling about for the sake of it.
The *only* recent change that I think is worthwhile is the unread bar - but previous versions used bold - as does the new one (bar + bold text) so have we really made an improvement here?
All the recent flattening, removal of texture, removal of colour is a reversion back to the simple UI of the 1980's when CPUs were small and graphics cards were terrible. The UI's were simple because there was not the horsepower to do better.
Whatever happened to the style guides of the 1990s about buttons, shadows, some thought into making things look useable? Now we have flat buttons with no raised shading, flat mono-colour icons so I can't find anything (I have over 200 folders in outlook and the endless visual search is mentally draining).
I have no idea where you get your user acceptance information from, but perhaps you should research The Hawthorne Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect) Perhaps all your changes approved by users are just because they like something a bit different, not because it's actually better.
The recent changes with more spacing, more changes to buttons, less ability to get stuff done... this is all steps backward.
Please microsoft - undo most of these silly changes. The core function of Outlook is good. Please stop trying to put lipstick on it. Put it back how it was and then leave it alone.
By the way I had to go through a convoluted sign up process to post this, which is a measure of how grumpy I am about the changes you made.
