The Yammer team continually measures user interaction on their web site. Analysis of this data and suggestions for improvement lead to minor updates to the user interface over time. You can read more about their process here. Through their A/B testing and rapid deployment process thanks to their cloud infrastructure, enhancements essentially appear overnight instead of through service packs. This week, Yammer released an updated user interface. Here is a quick recap of some of the changes as features have moved.
Functional Changes
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The More link contained a number of menu items for bookmarking, topics and conversation management like View, Hide and Delete. This menu is no longer at the bottom of the post next to the Like, Reply and Share links. It has moved to the upper left corner of the post area and is displayed as an ellipse (…). Since the More menu is in a new location and people have asked about how they do some these tasks, let’s also take a little time to run through the items in this menu.
- Follow In Inbox – this allows you to receive Inbox notifications when the thread is updated. This is useful when you are interested in following the discussion, but have not participated or not been @ mentioned.
- View Conversation – loads the conversation in the current page. It does not expand all of the replies in the thread, which I think would be a great feature if you are loading a single thread into a page.
- Hide Conversation – removes the conversation from your view. It will reappear if you are @ mentioned by another person or directly reply to the conversation. How do you reply to a conversation hidden from your view you may ask? The conversation would still be available via search as it is only hidden from the timeline view.
- Add Topics – to help categorize a thread, you can add topics without having to directly making a reply.
- Bookmark – use this to flag threads you want to find again quickly. Bookmarked threads can then be found on your profile page under the More tab. Click the More tab and select Bookmarks for a display of the ones you have created. Also, once the thread is bookmarked, an Unbookmark item is available in this menu, which will remove it from the bookmark list.
- Email me – sends you an email with the contents of the thread.
- Delete – if you have permission, you can delete the post. To have permission you need to be a group admin where the post is located, a Yammer admin (network or verified), or the person who created the post.
One last note on the More menu item. The information above is only for the More menu item located in the first post of a thread. There is still a More menu item in each of the replies. This reply specific More menu contains Email Me and Delete only.
Visual changes
- The background of the page is now a light gray instead of white.
- Each conversation sits in its own box instead of being separated by the horizontal line. This is similar to the presentation in the Windows 8 Yammer application.
- The gray shaded box for the replies is replaced with a simple horizontal line.
- Topics no longer appear in ‘tag’ like image. They appear as text with a small tag icon.
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The new messages button that appears when a post is made but not yet displayed on the page is bigger. Since the background is now all gray, it is a simple blue outline box.
Here is a screenshot of the new look Yammer page.
Overall, I like the new look. I also think the location of the functionality is more in line with how additional, but seldom used contextual items are displayed in Yammer and the rest Office platform.
Happy Yammering!
