Conversation view launched to simplify message overview

Marc Haefner, Senior Product Manager

Back in December 2011, XING launched its Beta Labs as a platform for users wanting to try out new XING features early on in their development. This also gave them an opportunity to provide feedback and shape new features to meet their own needs.

Today we launched our conversation view, which started out life as a Beta Labs feature and proved to be an instant hit so we had to make it available to more Beta Labs users than originally planned. We then took all of those users’ feedback and added what we could before today’s feature launch.

But what is the conversation view? The conversation view summarizes your personal messages so that you can see your entire written correspondence with one or more people on a certain subject. Individual messages are listed below one another in a compact view that just shows the first few lines of each message. To view a certain message in full, all you need to do is click anywhere in the compact message view which will then expand to display the entire message. You may well have come across this before if you have a smartphone or email program that already has this feature which is also great for collaboration processes as everyone involved can follow the discussion.

How it works

The sidebar on the left contains an envelope icon that only shows unread messages. To go to your inbox, just click on the All messages link where you’ll then be presented with an overview of all your messages. When you write a new message, you automatically start a new conversation. Replies to this message therefore continue this conversation, irrespective of whether the reply comes from you or one of your recipients. The right-hand side of this window shows you who’s involved in the conversation, and you can filter your inbox so you see just unread or sent messages.

If you want to send a message to someone involved in a conversation, just click on the little envelope icon in the messages box. And don’t forget that you can still search for certain senders or recipients in your inbox and delete conversations to keep things nice and tidy there.