Exploring an @mentions folder

How do you use @mentions today, as both the mentioner and the mentionee? Can you give a brief example?

I am mostly mentioned than a mentioner, from my team needing guidance, suggestions or wanting to highlight a snippet of an email in a comment for reference. 
 

When you're deciding what to focus on in your inbox, what role does being mentioned play in your prioritization?

As the manager of a client-facing team, my current “subscribed” is the first thing I open, before anything else in the “Open” section, starting with anything that I see on the conversation list has a comment at the bottom (so basically mentions to me) and once that’s done, I will move to the conversations that don’t have a new comment, because for those I have actioned something and I want to follow it until I know everyone’s fine and I can unsubscribe. 
Therefore I think a separate Mentions section would be extremely useful for the separation, but I would like it to be closer to Open than the mock-up.

Imagine you open the mentions section for the first time. What pieces of information would you need to see immediately to understand what it is and what you need to do next?

Workspace and inbox, a preview with the comment that has the mention I haven’t yet seen (note - in the event of multiple comments, I would prefer the preview to be the mention first, then when I expand the conversation, see the other comments), tags, assignee, time stamp so in essence not that different from the current conversations list. 

If this mentions section worked perfectly, what would it help you accomplish? Alternatively, what problems would it solve for you today?

I think right now I am used to the flow with my Subscribed but it could help me see mentions and other things more clearly so it’d be a bit more efficient. It would only help though if there is no overlap as otherwise it’d make it worse. 

Let's say you are mentioned in a single conversation five different times over the course of an hour. What would you need to see in a mentions section to efficiently deal with those five mentions?
Definitely like the mock-up and not separate comments - potentially a mentions counter per conversation/task etc on the list. I’d like to have the option to ​​​​​​​acknowledge the mention/mark it as read (as in this case I may make 1 comment to reply to everything and everyone). I would also like the option to switch between first unreplied/unread mention and not the latest (in my use case it would be because that person may have a client waiting the longest).

Extra: Mentions and Subscribed Q
With the above use-case I would then want to avoid duplication in the “Subscribed” - if that’s already part of settings/preferences that you have already taken into account, that’s great (or perhaps I’ve missed some settings on mine) but if not I’d want to make sure that there is a clear differentiation in how subscribed and mentioned work as they are not always correlated (i.e. not all mentions mean I need to remain subscribed to a conversation; equally I may subscribe to a conversation a team member is having if I want oversight, but they haven’t called me to action with a mention). 
This is also why I would want them to be in Open, but after today’s webinar I know I can potentially customise the sidebar myself to make them more prominent 

​@anthonyv Good callout. To clarify, our thinking now is that what shows in @mentions also still shows up in Open, ensuring Open is truly representative of everything. The mentions folder would behave the same as the tasks and discussions folders we’re re-introducing, essentially serving as quick access to that specific list of conversations.

​@marta In our current implementation, there would be duplication between Subscribed and @mentions. A conversation that mentions you would also show up in your Subscribed (that is also the behavior today). With this change, the benefit is you would have one place to view only the conversations where you are mentioned.

I think what you’re saying is, if you are @mentioned in a conversation, then you would not want to see the conversation in subscribed. Would your ideal workflow then be to manually subscribe to the conversation only if needed?

Thanks ​@conniechen all clear! 
Based on this, the difference between manually subscribing and manually unsubscribing feels minimal, so it’s likely that I wouldn’t use the dedicated @mentions section that much, other than potentially being able to search a conversation I remember I was tagged in quickly. But then this may as well be easier to do in the search bar than to have a dedicated view. 

Personally, I do like the idea of a Mentions area. I’ve used things like this in the past to help me not loose track of things I need to respond to when I’m in the middle of several things. I can see how it wouldn't be helpful to everyone, but it’s a definite quality of life thing for me.