Things to improve ...

MVP

Hey @Deleted, I thought I would bring the conversation over here, we're over a year in to using this platform, and for me it still really sucks, when can we see some real improvements. I love this community, and Office 365, please make the following better.

 

1. First page load time is just woeful, over 10 seconds, Yammer gets me to messages in half that time.  There's also a roughly 10% probability that the homepage won't work and just stick up a load of errors.

2. Not being able to paste image into post is painful inefficient in a technical forum, thank goodness Yammer and Teams don't need me to do that.

3. @ mentioning is rubbish and random, doesn't find people, I spend ages deleting and re-atting before I find someone or I give up.

 

The community managers, product teams, MVPs all do a sterling good job here, it needs fixing!

 

Oh also, if you could ban people pinning posts for more than 2 weeks, or having more than 2 things pinned, that would be much appreciated :)

16 Replies

See, totally impossible ....

 

Capture.PNG

slow.gif

@Steven Collier,

 

Thank you for your feedback, you make some very valid observations and certainly things we want to work on.

 

Page Load Times

 

We did a significant piece of work after Ignite to significantly reduce page load times (which were up to 30s in some cases). Are we done yet? No and I have already created a work item to see what we can do to improve the load time for the Latest Activity panel on the front page in the next couple of weeks. Longer team we are looking to redesign the front page to make it even easier to find and customize the community content you see on the front page as you see fit.

 

Not being able to paste Images into a post

 

We hear you, this is a limitation of the current editor the platform uses, we are discussion with the platform provider how we can improve this position in the future. In the mean time please do lend your support to this related idea as we use these idea's to measure how much an issue is impacting our customers. 

 

@Mentioning a user

 

To be fair @Mentioning works ok for most people in the example you have used its because I have many accounts on the community we use for testing sometimes. Part of the problem is that our Display names are not unique in the community. Maybe this is something we need to rethink as we continue to grow. 

 

Pinned Topics

For the most part pinned topics are owned by the individual product teams. We encourage all teams to review pinned topics regularly and remove any that are old / no longer relevant. Time boxing pinned posts is not a feature we currently support, it's an interesting idea and something I will look into further.

 

I couldn't agree more that all the staff and MVPs are a vital part of the community who, as you say, all do a sterling job. 

 

I appreciate you taking the time to provide this feedback and please rest assured we are actively working to address these issues. 

It has been over 1 month, and the home page load time is still over 10 seconds. Improving perf on a page like that should not take that long.

Hi @Dean Gross

 

Thank you for poking this thread and sharing your views, they are always appreciated. Our development team did some work on this before we had to focus on delivering the Tech Summit content.

 

Unfortunately, due to the custom way we combine the community content on this page there is no way to increase the page load time for the Latest Activity feed that would make sense or make an effective use of our development time.

 

Instead we have decided to accelerate our work to redesign the home page and one of the key elements of this redesign will be to make the page load much quicker. We are still working through the final design so I can not share more at this time but we are looking to be able to do the development work and roll out the new design by end of January with iterative updates as we see how people use it.

 

I appreciate this is disappointing but I think ultimately it will provide a better experience for everyone than a "quick patch" which delays other improvements.

January has come and gone, the performance of the home page is still very poor. Where is the new design? I don't even go to the home page because it takes so long.

 

In my experience, this is the slowest loading page on the entire internet. Its like using a dialup modem in 1993.

HI Dean,

We have been working on this since December, and its not a simple 'fix' without seriously changing the way the homepage is structured. As noted in the blog I sent out yesterday the most recent change made the homepage load, on average, in less than 5 seconds.

This marks a significant improvement over where it was back in December and if you are not seeing such an improvement then I would like to know more about your system and its configuration so I can try to understand what might be causing even slower load times for you.

Drop me a PM if your seeing consistently slower loading times with the detail I have asked for above to let me look into this further.

Just in case, in my environment refresh of Home page takes about 6 seconds in Vivaldi and Opera and about 7 seconds in Edge and IE11.

 

But yes - it's faster than it was before. 

Thanks for the reply, I had missed your announcement (probably because it is so darn difficult to find new, unread items -but that is a separate topic). The home page is loading much faster for me now, typically 4-5 seconds on a wi-fi connection with Chrome and Windows 10. Please tell the devs thanks for me. 

Hi @Dean Gross

 

Glad your seeing the benefit but could you tell me about the problems your having finding new unread threads? Would love to understand that and see what we can do to improve the experience. 

Here is an example of the problem i have. I clicked on the SharePoint space, and i see 14 unread posts in the SharePoint AMA subspace, so I click on it. I scroll down the page and I see a few posts with a gray bar on the left (which i think indicates that I have not read them), I read and keep scrolling until i get tire, click the up arrow, click the SharePoint breadcrumb link to get back to the main space and the number of unread posts has not changed. 

If I do the above, and click on the items with the gray bar on the left, nothing happens to make the bar go away. The only way to mark it as read seems to be by clicking on the initial item in the conversation and when I do that, clicking the Next Conversation link, takes me to a conversation that I have already read.

what I'd really like to be able to do is quickly skim through new conversations (like i can in yammer) so that I don't have to keep scrolling through stuff I have already seen.

 

Right so your reading the post's at the space level, which is essentially supposed to be a 'preview' and never actually clicking into the individual posts.

I could see how that could be annoying - let me think on that one.

We have already kind of broken the forum view by exposing so much of the content at the board level which has an adverse impact on the number of views an individual post gets because less people actually click down the actual post.

Have your devs go talk to the Yammer team, i don't have to click on posts to mark them as read in that system

@Dean Gross

 

If only it was that simple - we own yammer where as we do not own Lithium (the platform the tech community runs on). This means we have to work within certain design concepts.

 

There are certainly things we can change and lithium is highly customizable but there are good reasons why the some of the interaction styles work the way they do.

 

Like I say leave it with me and I will have a think through how we could improve that UX for you. 

if that can't be easily done, would it be possible to change the Next Conversation link, to go to the next Unread Conversation? this is really the root cause of my frustration, having to click through conversations that i have already seen and which have no responses.

Have you considered using Yammer ? :)