Hide the reply button under every message
The "reply" button is WAY too large under each message. I recommend either making the button just a smaller icon and off to the side of a message, or only showing it on hover.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news. This item has been declined. There will be no work to hide or remove the reply button.
As many people have commented, a big ask is to help improve how people distinguish between giving a reply and starting a new message.
For that the focus will be on this item. “Better visual delineation between `Reply` and `Start a new conversation`”
http://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103/suggestions/19224826
205 comments
Comments are closed-
Kim commented
it is really a PITA, the reply button under each message.
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Hasif commented
Why on earth is this declined? Slack does this 1000 times better than teams. Just put a button at the side of the message. The reply button makes everything unnecessarily big.
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Anonymous commented
This should really be an option. Chat layouts haven't changed much in 30 years because they were fine as is. The threaded conversation thing just gets in the way of.... having a conversation its so much wasted space. Teams is the ONLY client that does this - please leave this feature for facebook and yammer, not teams.
This especially important for people who are hands on all day, something that requires a mouse is obnoxious
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Karen commented
I decline to use Teams then.
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Ross commented
Well, that's entirely unacceptable.
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TH commented
I am with MS guys on it - conversations within channel are a great feature. And this more clear distinction between Reply to conversation and starting a new thread is needed.
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Flo commented
Fine the way it is for me. Too many people would create new threads instead of replying if reply was too small. Indeed possibility to customize would be the best, but this is so cosmetic... They are many other features/bugs to look at and use "vote" on.
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Anonymous commented
The interface looks so ugly because of all the unused whitespacing everywhere. It seems like you started with mobile-first and then just got stuck there? It looks pretty decent on mobile but the width of conversations, the spacing between messages and the constant reply button all together makes it so much harder to look at the one thing that actually matters - the text - the message. It's a chat window after all.
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Sean Ellis commented
This also ties into the problem of starting a new conversation vs replying to an existing one. A better interface which conforms the common expectation that the bottom-most input text box on the screen is a "reply" box would eliminate this entire question by removing the need for "reply" buttons at all.
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ms commented
The reply *is* smaller than it used to be.
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Anonymous commented
Why can't you make it customisable so that both groups can use it? There always will be users who favour/dislike threads. Your user base is too diverse to impose one groups preferences on another one.
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Fredrik Forséll commented
Declining this sucks. Hopefully you will get to removing threads altogether instead. All those in favor of threads, please use Yammer.
https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/16941412-allow-option-to-remove-threads-feature-in-a-chan -
Sharath commented
But I feel when reply button is large and this makes conversation is not in sequence.Focus is more on reply button rather than conversation for which MS Teams is meant for.Please look at this prospective.
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Anonymous commented
This is a major reason on why we haven't migrated from Slack. Actually, this and other smaller UI/UX stuff that's just so poorly designed.
When I go to channel, I need to quickly see what's there and, if needed, scroll a bit to see recent history. With this horrible and completely out sized Reply button coupled with bad use of horizontal space makes this process awful (you have to do 3x scrolling) and the whole experience is visually cluttered. Everybody on our team stressed this as a major pain. You won't be gaining us as customers until you change this, sad to hear this. -
Christian Gustafson commented
I wonder if there is a little confusion about what this request actually is. A few actions already exists next to the overflow menu on every message (bookmark/thumbs up). Couldn't we simply add the reply button here? Doesn't seem like a change to the UX but would clean up the feed a bit.
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Tim Hardy commented
I switched to Slack the moment I saw the Teams interface with all that vertical space consumed with Reply, Reply, Reply, Reply... Been happily using Slack every since.
I will continue to do so.
I do find it sad that the major complaint here is with the UX and wasted space, but MS doesn't seem to get that. I never even thought about threading when I voted for this. I just hated the basic chat interface to the point I choose not to use it.
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Monk commented
When this first got added, I believe the reply box was much larger. So I think that is a fine focus, at least for now. Thanks for the update.
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John Roers commented
Since people are so divided on this, a setting to enable/disable Threading for a channel seems like the obvious path. Most of my channels would be much easier to follow without threading.
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Chris Webb commented
Ps. Thanks for the update. Smart to not hide it. But I concur with the few others here saying new conversation should be a button or a way to distinguish better than it is.
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Chris Webb commented
Product is dead? Your a special kind of dumb. This product once it gets private channels and true guest access will blow slack away. The UI is better. If you want to stay in that platform have fun with flat nasty convos.