Microsoft Outlook is easily one of the most used software products by businesses — yet it is also one of the most flawed products on the market. The latest version of Outlook for Mac attempts to make a big leap forward with its updated User Experience and we will say that it appears to be heading in the right direction. However, there are several obvious flaws that we’ve pointed out below that can and should be addressed.

Hover Icons on Messages

Each message listed in the Inbox displays action icons (delete, archive, flag, or pin) that appear when the user hovers over the message. These icons not only take up a lot of valuable screen real estate but they can (and often are) accidentally clicked when the user is attempting to simply open the email message. In addition, the attachment clip icon and the reply arrow icons appear to be clickable but they are not.

How we’d make it better:

1. Since opening and reading the email messages is the primary user action, these icons really represent secondary or even tertiary actions. Based on this, we would place all the icons into an ellipsis menu on the far right of the message rows (see screenshot on the right). This will:
   1. Make better use of valuable screen real estate
   2. Remove the possibility of accidentally clicking an action button.
   3. Provide plenty of space to label each icon so the users know what each icon does.

Multi-selecting Email Messages

Currently, the only way to select multiple email messages in the inbox is to hold down the shift key as you click each message. The problem is, this requires all users to know about this key command “trick” and a good UX should not rely solely on the users knowing tricks or hidden shortcuts. Personally, I have to re-teach my own mother and brother this key command every time they ask me how they can select multiple items.

How we’d make it better:

Include checkboxes at the beginning of each email message (see screenshot below). This will be a much clearer way for users to know how to select multiple emails without needing to know the key command. Plus, Outlook already uses checkboxes in other places in its UI so there’s even less of a reason for not including them here.

Creating a New Event (Bug?)

When attempting to create a new event by double-clicking on a day from the Calendar screen, the Reminder pop-up displays before the user even finishes saving the new event. This appears to be a bug because it only seems to happen when trying to create a new event on the current day or certain future days within the current month.

How we’d make it better:

Fix the bug so that the Reminder pop-up never displays before the new event is created.

Inconsistent Location of the Exact Same Buttons

This one doesn’t seem to make any sense and makes us wonder if different people worked on the different versions of the same screen. When you click a day on the Calender, you get the short-form modal window for creating a new event with the Discard and Save buttons located on the bottom right of the modal. When you expand open the modal to view the long-form version of the screen, the Discard and Save buttons are not only flopped but they are moved to the left side of the screen.

Here we see two different locations for the Send button. When creating a new message, the Send button is located in the top left of the screen. When creating a new Calendar Event with attendees, the Send button is located in the bottom left of the screen.

A big part of creating a great user experience is consistency throughout the application and there appears to be no good reason why these buttons display differently in the two different versions of the same screen.

How we’d make it better:
Make sure the same or similar buttons are placed consistently in the same location throughout the application.

‘You’re Muted!’

One issue that seems to happen on nearly every video call is that users don’t know or remember that they are muted. So, they begin talking and everyone else on the call starts saying “You’re Muted!”. It’s almost become a living meme at this point. One of the reasons this happens so often is that Teams only gives users some easy-to-miss indicators that let them know they are muted.

How we’d make it better:
Other video conferencing applications like GoToMeeting can detect that you are trying to talk when your microphone is muted and they display a message on top of the microphone icon letting you know “You’re muted” — hopefully before someone on the call yells at you. They also use a solid green icon to indicate an “On” state and a grey icon to indicate and ‘Off’ state for your microphone, camera, and screen sharing options. This use of dramatically different colors helps the user know when their microphone is “On” vs “Off”.

Call Selected People

Having several people be part of a ‘team’ in a group chat can be convenient for discussions and sharing ideas but arranging calls between members of that team can sometimes get tricky. If one or several members are out that day, or you simply need to speak with a few people in that group chat, the Teams app requires you to make a call to the whole team or create an entire new group chat.

How we’d make it better:
Make the Video Chat and Audio Chat buttons into dropdowns that give users the option to call the whole group or just certain selected people. This frees the user from having to constantly create new group chats and avoid calling people who aren’t needed for a certain call.

A Tab for Links

Links are shared very frequently in chats on Teams but finding a link someone posted days or weeks ago can be a challenge.

How we’d make it better:
Add a ‘Links’ tab next to the ‘Files’ tab where users can quickly scroll through the links posted in the chat.

Search Within a Selected Chat

Teams has a decent global search function located in the top bar that enables you to search across all chats but sometimes you just want to find something within a selected chat instead of having to scroll back through all the messages. Currently, there is a hidden trick for doing this that requires you to somehow know to use the ‘command+F’ or ‘control+F’ keyboard shortcut. This will change the global search field into a ‘/find within @Chat’ function (see screenshot below).

How we’d make it better:

• Add a search icon near the other action buttons within a given chat. Clicking this search icon would change the ‘global search’ field into the ‘/find within @Chat’ field.
• The search results should then behave similar to the ‘Find’ feature in your Chrome web browser whereby the words you’re looking to find are highlighted in yellow and the scroll bar indicates all places within the chat that the word can also be found.

Chat Filter

After several months of chatting back and forth within a given group chat, the number of messages can really pile up. Sometimes you just want to filter down the messages to just those within a certain date range or from a certain user and right now there is no good way to do this.

How we’d make it better:
Add a ‘Filter’ icon to the action buttons within a given chat. When clicked, it could display filtering options, such as a date range and users.

Reply Feature

Sometimes several conversation topics start happening within a given group chat and it’s hard to keep track of what message is replying to what other message. Or, sometimes someone asks a series of specific questions in separate messages and you want to reply directly to each question instead of adding a single message to the bottom of the whole chat thread. Unfortunately, Teams does not provide a way to reply to a single message in a chat thread.

How we’d make it better:
iOS Message does a good job of letting you reply directly to a specific message within a conversation thread by providing a contextual menu on a message that includes a simple ‘Reply’ feature. For Teams, we would simply expand the existing ellipses menu to include a ‘Reply to this message’ option.