Teams Rolls Out New Conversation Button

[TonyRedmond]

Adding a New conversation button to the Teams client user interface might seem like an insignificant UI tweak. However, keeping replies with their topics is important because it helps users find information and helps compliance searches assemble full conversations. Not many would think about how a UI change affects compliance and eDiscovery searches, but we do…

https://office365itpros.com/2020/09/10/teams-rolls-out-new-conversation-button/

[#2]

Very exciting news, @TonyRedmond 

[#3]

@TonyRedmond I really wish we could make this optional.  On a small screen it really eats up real estate, and always makes me thing I have unread messages.

[#4]

@Gregory_Kempenich  I hear you... and others have voiced the same concern. But the Teams product group did lots of testing with users before they made their decision. Overall, I think it's reasonable.

[#5]

Having this button optional would be very helpful. In the past this was just a text box, and now we have to click the "new conversation" button to then click into the text box to reach out to one another. Sure, this is only a couple of seconds per instance, however this adds up and undercuts efficiency.  

[#6]

@TonyRedmond 

for people who know how to answer to existing topics, the new button is just an aweful time and workflow killer!

[#7]

I agree.  We've set up a channel to track who takes which email in our shared inbox and it's better that each one be a new convo every time.  

[#8]

@TonyRedmond This is an awful feature that our organization does not need. How can we disable?

[#9]

@echapman AFAIK, you can't.

[#10]

@TonyRedmond 

This is a truly awful feature, none of the the other many chat tools do this (slack, mattermost, discord, rocket). Instead they allow people to reply to a message if they want and hence creating a thread. 

Having to "create a conversation" for every IM is just plain strange. Why does MS always think they are smarter than everyone else!!! Please add a way to remove this from channels. 

My team no longer uses channels because of this, we just use a group chat. 

[#11]

This feature is an obstacle to adoption, the Achilles heel for Teams. To avoid the button click, users instead continue to use chats, thus losing all the benefits of teams. By sticking with chats, users lose access to threads and channels. They lose access to discoverability. In other words, they lose access to the features that actually make Teams competitive.

Further, because the button says "New Conversation" rather than simply "New Post" it implies that the user shouldn't even be here unless they have something to say that meets the qualifications of a "conversation". The UX design subtly implies that users ought to instead use chats for "chat" and ought to go DM for threading, thus disintermediating other users from following along with threaded deep-dives.

It's worth noting that conversations themselves in Teams also require a disambiguating click (of the "reply" icon). So they are no more convenient to use, but it certainly would be more usable if that click were to open a sidebar rather than an inline conversation.