Forum Discussion
Can you please stop changing the layout/navigation?
Just when I'm comfortably used to the next iteration, and you change everything all over again. How do I get to the page listing all my favourited spaces now? I have to browse the Communities instead...
Allen
Community Manager
Community ManagerHi VasilMichev,
Favourited spaces are being phased out, simply put only a small handful of users were using them and got how they were used.
We are instead going to surface another community feature in their place called subscriptions. This will allow you to get email digest of areas you subscribe to. You can control how often you get these digests here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/user/myprofilepage/tab/user-subscriptions:notification-settings.
The problem with favourites was that they are not native to the community platform we are using and so it was very hard to do anything useful with them. We could only pull 25 of your favourited communities in one go and that is becoming troublesome now the community is getting much larger.
Hence why we deprecated 'My Home' because it was nearing its maximum capacity for the number of favourited spaces you could have.
Moving to the concept of subscribed spaces will help us get the latest and greatest information into your inbox so you can deal with it at a time that suits you, as well as meaning you do not have to be actually logged into the community to get it. You will also be able to see your subscribed boards and threads here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/user/myprofilepage/tab/user-subscriptions:email-subscriptions.
I get from what you are saying that your looking for a quick way to get to the conversations you have favourited, but I am not 100% sure why it would take 10 times as many clicks to get to that content, I agree it may take a couple of extra clicks.
We do surface content from the spaces your a member of on the home page as well, maybe you could share with me a little more what it is you got from My Home that you do not think you will be able to get via either Subscriptions or using these feeds?
I truly appreciate the time your taking to share your feedback because its always valuable to listen to what our MVPs tell us.
i don't need more stuff in my inbox, I just want to be able to scan through a Community/Space and if something looks interesting, readit and contribute if I can. Lithium makes this much more difficult than Yammer and has not provided me any compelling reasons to hang out for any significant period of time. I'm much less involved than I used to be for this exact reason.
- Allen
Thank you for sharing, I am obviously sorry to see your not spending as much time in the community. What criteria are you using to identify 'interesting stuff'?
Is it:
- Discussions on a specific topic?
- Discussions on a specific product?
- Discussions you have previously engaged with?
Really looking to try to help address this but I need some hard information on what exactly it is we are not delivering so I can work with the team to identify how we might help you meet this.
Again I would like to re-iterate that we can not continue with the 'Follow' and My Home UI in the way it was working until now as it would have started to miss more and more content as the number of potential sources increased.
AllenI will typically go to Community Space for a Product/Service that I'm interested in an start skimming the questions. When I see one that I know something about, I'll answer it. I'll also go back to see the answers that other people have added to a conversation I have been part of.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, we REALLY need some way to easily hide stuff that we have already read. It is tremendously tedious to scroll through the same posts over and over
Logged in today... tried to find a space I favorited... couldn't... looks like that heart is gone on purpose? Went to the link you posted, and all I see is a bunch of individual conversations I subscribed to.
While I very much like they idea of being able to subscribe to spaces (which I thought I already had done), I'm missing the ability to go browse the top-ish level things.
Allen - am I missing something else, or is navigating to the things I cared to have easy access to gone?
- Allen
The heart has not yet entirely gone but it has gone from the top right of the home page. It will be totally removed shortly.
Is your ask similar to VasilMichev?
Conversations I've started and Conversations I'm following (I'd like to be able to follow a conversation, and be opted in to follow if I reply... as for monitoring a conversation, I'm never going to distinguish between something I reply to and something I want to follow even if I don't reply)... those are useful for sure. But those seem more like an indicator of my activity than an indicator of things I want to follow. It would be neat to see them integrated into the Notification Feed page.
However, that's still missing an easy way for me to jump into topics I want to follow. Some sort of dashboard (at the top of the notifications fee maybe) that lists my spaces and an indicator of # new conversations / comments / likes / mentions / answers / blog posts. I'd use something like that to "check in" as it were, instead of filling my inbox. Maybe selecting the space on the dashboard them would filter the feed to just those entries... and further selecting an indicator would further refine the filter. But then I could
I use "checking in" to mean... Anything going wrong in "my" communities for other people that might also be going wrong for me? Any questions I can answer for other people? Anything cool someone else has done that I can try? Any new product announcements?
It'd also be where I start my search for help on new queries of my own. Right now, there's no longer a way for me to easily get to a specific space /community to have my search results filtered based on what community I am in.
Honestly, now that I'm poking around, I realize there's a "My Communities" page, and I found I joined a few communities that I've forgotten about I wish I hadn't of forgotten. When I "favorited" spaces before, I thought I was signing up to be alerted. When I wasn't getting emails, I figured out how to do that for a few spaces. There's quite a few communities/spaces I'd like to be able to "monitor/check into" for which I'm not all that interested in being notified about.
Allen If I wanted to use email notifications, I would. I'm already part of a dozen forums/communities (TechNet/MSDN, Answers, MTC, EE, Spiceworks to name a few), if I subscribe for new posts on each of those my mailbox will simply explode. I prefer to browse the MTC instead, and the Dashboard was fine for this purpose.
Again, it's about getting to the Spaces I follow, not Communities, not Conversations. Home tab lists 4 per page, how many times do I need to press the "more" button to get all the results? Perhaps you can move that page someplace else and have it load a more suitable number of results?
- Allen
Lets see if we can come up with another way to meet your use case because, as I mentioned in my original reply, the feed used for My Home was going to become broken in the next month anyway so it had to go.
I take it that using the 'Conversations I started' or the 'Conversations I have replied' to on your profile page does not meet your needs?
So, the ask here is to have a list of all conversations that you have expressed some sort of interest in listed in perpetuity somewhere right?
This list must:
- Know which spaces / discussions or individual posts you want to be able to review
- List them in chronological order
- Expand indefinitely without a need for you to click see more or next?
Did I miss anything?
We may discuss pros and cons for each approach forever, but main point new navigation pushes to change the style of work with the resource. After that you spend time to become more familiar with new UI, make almost automatic some actions - and after that we have another new UI. That cycle continuous forever. Not only here, elsewhere.
As for me previous approach was more suitable. One icon to shift on any of my places. Emails - they don't give full picture (post itself plus replies) and don't show exact content of the posts (lost of formatting in some cases, no attachment). RSS works bit better from that point of view. Thus if something interesting I open the page. And why to jump from email to site and back if I could see everything on site only?
