Feedback on Outlook 2010 Conversations View

Question

Outlook 2010 Conversations view is a great idea, but the Beta implementation has a few usability problems which prevent the feature from being successful-- if I had to use the feature in RTM in its current Beta state, I'd probably turn it off. But fixing it seems not too difficult-- there are only a handful of very annoying usability issues I've found so far.  It'd be great to see the issues below addressed in RTM. 
1) Keyboard Navigation shouldn't cause auto-expansion. When using the keyboard arrow keys to scroll through my inbox, Outlook will auto-expand the selected conversation.  The result is that scrolling with the keyboard is like playing whack-a-mole, with conversations expanding and collapsing seemingly at random.  This prevents effective reading of message titles and auto-previews.  The same thing sometimes happens when I delete a conversation and the following conversation is selected. In either case, you should *never* auto-expand a conversation unless I press ENTER or right-arrow on a selected conversation.  For mouse selection, auto-expansion seems more reasonable since you're not doing mouseclick-mouseclick-mouseclick in sequence like you do from the keyboard when reading and deleting messages.
2) Converation "From" is confusing. Your "From" field shows any unread senders only, and shows all senders if all messages are unread. I'd expect to see all senders in both cases. What's even worse is when you use auto-preview and the most recent message is already read. In that case, you'll see auto-preview text from the most recent (read) message but see a sender(s) of older messages. You'll see User-X's name as sender of User-Y's AutoPreview text.  Weird!
3) minor thing: double-click of a collapsed conversation opens the newest message. Once it's expanded, double-click doesn't do anything. It should behave the same in both cases.
4) If you hit up arrow or down arrow to select a conversation, then quickly hit ENTER to open the top message in the conversation, it doesn't do anything. If you do the same thing but wait one second, before pressing ENTER, it will open the newest message. Behavior should be the same in both cases.
5) When I use up/down arrow to select a message with auto-preview showing, sometimes the auto-preview will vanish and sometimes it won't. This is really disconcerting since my eyes need to jump upwards several lines to see what just got expanded. If something is there when the thread is collapsed, it should stick around when it's expanded. Oddly, I don't see this behavior for all conversations-- some will stay showing auto-preview, some won't. Perhaps only one-line auto-previews stick around while 2-3 line autopreviews are hidden upon expansion?
6) When I right-click on a collapsed conversation, I'd expect to see "reply" or "reply-all" options (meaning reply to the topmost message in that conversation) but instead I need to separately select the message to reply to.
Other than these gripes, I think conversations view is definitely headed in the right direction. Nice work!
BTW, I already posted this feedback to the Office 2010 blog, but I got no responses there so am posting here so my feedback won't get lost. 
Justin Grant

Answer 1

Thanks Diane for the quick reply!  Some follow-up notes:
1. Cool!  This is exactly the behavior I was looking for. Once I clicked the checkbox in Options, the behavior is much more predictable when using the keyboard.  It's a bummer this setting is not easier to discover.  Seems like this should be the default setting.  Note that there's a display bug when this option is selected-- I sometimes see odd visual artifacts after I collapse a thread with the keyboard, e.g. rectangles which aren't painted correctly or show up as gray boxes.
2. Nope, you didn't understand correctly. :-)  The problematic scenario is where there are some unread and some read messages in a conversation. In that case, the autopreview text shows for the most recent message in the thread (regardless of whether it's read or not) but the "From" field shows the senders of the unread branches only. The result is you can see a sender of one message showing up above the autopreview text for a totally different message. This is weird. And then once you read the last unread message, all the senders come back in the From field, so reading one message causes From to show 10 senders where before it showed only one. 
After using it for a while, I like the auto-preview behavior of always showing the most recent message in auto-preview, even if that particular message is read. I also like the behavior of continuing to show auto-preview until all branches of the thread are read. What I don't like is the "From" behavior showing a varying number of senders depending on what's read vs. not. Instead, I'd like to see "From" show all the senders on the thread, in order of recency (most recent branches should show up at the front of From).  Extra credit if unread senders show up bold and read senders unbold, but I'd also be OK with all senders showing up bold if the mixed boldness is too hard.
3. try double-clicking on the name (the top line) of an expanded conversation. the double-click doesn't do anything. it should collapse the conversation-- the reverse of what happens when you double-click on a collapsed conversation.
4. doesn't matter now that I have a solution for #1! :-)
5. not a big deal now that I have a solution for #1.
6. This was a bad choice for cleanup: reply is the probably most common (after delete!) operation you want to do on a conversation!  Certainly more common than printing or quick steps or the other random things remaining in that context menu. Anyway, thanks for the tip-- I always use right-click for replies, didn't think to use keyboard.
> FWIW, most people don't like the conversation view.
Hmmm. Now that I know about the keyboard no-expand setting, I like Conversations a lot more! If the Office folks can fix the From field issue (#2 above), then the feature will be, to me at least, good enough for RTM.
But assuming these usability quirks get fixed, I really do need this feature.  I get hundreds of messages per day and without Conversations I'd have a much harder time dealing with the incoming load-- this is a feature I've been needing for years. I also really like the ability to see my Sent items on the same Conversation without making a trip to Advanced Find. 
FWIW, Conversations (assuming the usability issues get addressed) is literally the only feature of Office 2010 that would justify the upgrade price for me.  The other improvements in Outlook and the other Office apps are nice, but Conversations saves me several minutes every day... and that productivity adds up quickly!
Justin Grant