Better visual delineation between `Reply` and `Start a new conversation`
It's very confusing to new users that there is a difference between replying to an existing conversation and starting a new one within a channel. This is a visual thing as much as anything else. The 'reply' buttons are not naturally attractive if you just want to start typing a message. There should be a logical gap between the bottom of a conversation and 'start a new conversation'. 'Start a new conversation' needs to be separated visually, as if it's a second order command rather than a first order...reply.
Stephen Ellis
shared this idea
We have been iterating on different designs and are starting to test internally. I don’t have a timeframe but will keep you posted.
654 comments
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NK
commented
This topic/request just turned 3 years old, two days ago! We should have a birthday party for it every year at this time!
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Anonymous
commented
It's been over a year since the last update on this... what's the latest?
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ValH
commented
any updates?
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Darris Martin
commented
What happened?
"We are shipping this SO soon. By the end of the year, the team says. Woo hoo!" - Oct 2018So ummm... Why isn't this a thing yet? Our rooms get so flooded with new chats by the time they realize "oops we should have been threading" it is like 30 deep.
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Bill
commented
Super confuse for new users, there is nearly 99% our end-users keep pressing 'Start a new conversation' for discussion until the channel becomes very messy and ugly! Please lah... Enhance the UI faster lahhh....
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Jessica Barcelo
commented
So many times coworkers are starting new conversations instead of replying to the thread we are discussing which leads to difficulty linking those one off messages that are not attached to the original conversation. I think that if the start new conversation were off to the side in like a little bubble that you literally need to click on to expand and see all of the edit options/emoji/etc would help to alleviate this issue. For example how the Join a team has a little symbol in front of it. A different symbol could be used and once you click it then it would open the text box to start a new conversation.
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Anonymous
commented
Your mobile UI is so much clearer !
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Jasper
commented
Only 606 comments and 6973 votes! I think this isn't the only one of these threads... I really hope this is still on .... someone's radar. It's kind of crazy this has been the case for this long. It's immediately problematic and all of our team regularly has issues with this. The fact that the new conversation box literally obscures the "reply" box is especially frustrating.
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Francis
commented
Glad to see I'm not the only one missing this....
Microsoft: maybe take a hint from Yammer which has the "new conversation" vs "reply" very well delimited and easy to grasp!
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Anonymous
commented
Almost this thread's third birthday. Should we bake a cake? (And it's still an incredible annoyance)
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D Powell
commented
Interface is everything and this is at the top of my gripes about Teams. It is the products' single-most annoying usability problem (to me) and in my mind the single simplest thing to fix. It is utterly staggering to think that this has been rumbling on for 3 years!
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Anonymous
commented
c'mon with nearly 7000 votes & still not done? suggest you go for a simple interim solution (like the suggested super-simple SOLID LINE), while your team is working on the perfect solution... what would be the harm in that? but please no more of these "still being worked on", "making good headway", "still in the works", "will start shipping soon". at least be real, pls and thank you.
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Andrew
commented
Just adding my voice to this. Forget about the other pointless upgrades, this is a real problem with the interface and leads to a lot of "noise" in channels when stuff is not kept within existing conversations.
Seriously, please consider this issue, with 6900 votes to be important. -
Garrett Nelson
commented
I can't believe it has been over a year and this hasn't been solved yet.
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Carolyn Gaither
commented
Even a thick bold line dividing Reply from Start new would help
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Jonny
commented
We've turned this into a feature. Whenever somebody starts a new conversation instead of replies to a thread (which happens several times a day for our team), we all post reaction gifs and keep that thread alive forever. We sometimes even forget about the original thread and just keep the failed reply alive instead. Very fun (not super productive). +1 to fixing this.
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Phil Ellis
commented
Teams is getting adopted by a lot of places now, and this function is massively broken, I think a lot of places start using teams as a replacement for Skype for Business, so they start with the chat features which allow you to talk to multiple people by entering text into the large bottom text box.
The problem with Channels is that box starts a new conversation, not replying to existing conversations, it takes a lot of getting used to. If you get a notification that someone has posted a new message in a channel clicking on that notification takes you to the channel only, I think it might be more ideal to take you to the reply dialog instead of new conversation. I'd say everyone in our office starts a new conversation when they intended to reply, so it's clearly not intuitive to many. There are so many other instances of this being done right: Discord, Slack, other web based systems. I don't get why this isn't a higher priority. -
Jeff Smith
commented
Can we please get an update on this. There has been nothing for over a year after comments stating that it would be released in 2018. So many of the changes being pushed through on a regular basis are ridiculous compared to this fundamental issue not being fixed already.
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Patrick Szalapski
commented
It would be a very easy tweak to just shift the "Start a conversation" bar left so that it left-aligns with the avatar images.
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Mark
commented
This is more than an annoyance, it is detrimental to productivity. We recently started a division-wide Teams channel for incident response, with the idea that people start a discussion when an incident happens so everyone can see it and jump on to work on a solution. Whenever there are multiple incidents happening simultaneously, people's "new conversations" (that were meant to be replies to a discussion) all get mixed together and it becomes impossible to tell what they are responding to. These are otherwise intelligent professionals, many of whom know the correct way use this feature, but still make the mistake. It's a big problem.