Forum Discussion
[CHANNELS] Post Order - Use Top Down (Recent -Old)
Our 20-person development team is absolutely baffled at this terrible new UX/UI bug. The reason given for the change on post ordering is objectively incorrect, and represents a profound misunderstanding of what Teams actually is, and how it is used in the real world.
Teams is a Slack-style communications package designed to facilitate conversations among team members in an office setting. It is particularly valuable to hybrid/remote teams. Most people constantly switch back and forth between "chats" (conversations between 1 or more people) and "teams" (group conversations fixed and attached to categories). In practice, these two methods of communicating need to follow consistent UX logic as they are often used more-or-less interchangeably. I don't necessarily remember whether the thing I'm talking about is in a seven-member group chat in chats or a seven-member group chat in teams, after all.
In the chats area, new messages are always at the bottom, as expected, and you scroll up to go back in time and see history. In the teams area, this functionality has been inexplicably reversed to require you to scroll DOWN to see history. Toggling back and forth between chats and teams now creates a confusing whiplash. This is made doubly more confusing because even the "comments" of each threaded chat have recent at the bottom, not the top. The op claims this is to make Teams more consistent with "Facebook"... but Teams is not Facebook and no one would ever use it as Facebook. The teams area is broken up into dozens of categories that are broken into dozens of subcategories. Each of these categories is essentially a named "chat" group. The only difference really between teams and chat areas is that the teams conversations are threaded and the chat areas are not. But they are still both, essentially, chat rooms. So they absolutely, positively must behave the same as each other or it's essentially an unusable tool.
The only situation I can imagine the new top-down method being useful is if you're at a company that treats the teams area as an announcements zone or something without a lot of communication underneath. But that is not our agency, or anywhere I've ever worked. So at an absolute minimum, there needs to be an option to sort the traditional, logical, consistent way, and keep the bizarre, misguided upside-down-but-only-sometimes way as a non-default option.