Microsoft Teams Teams Rolls Out New Conversation Button
An Improvement to the Teams Client User Interface
People have been complaining about how easy the Teams client user interface (desktop and browser) makes it to create new topics instead of posting replies to existing conversations.
Fast forward to today, and news from Microsoft is that “the journey to reducing dangling replies” which started in early 2018 is reaching an important point with the roll-out of a New conversation button to all tenants. The roll-out has already started and should be complete worldwide by the end of next week.
Introducing the Conversation Button
Figure 1 shows the difference. At the top, you can see a topic with the new button in full view. It’s much more obvious how to start a new topic as opposed to a reply to the last topic. The bottom screenshot shows the old interface. You can argue that it’s still obvious how to “start a new conversation,” but the evidence is that many people mixed up replies and new topics when they responded to a conversation, leading to the infamous dangling replies (not connected to a topic), and a chaotic list of posts that made it harder for Teams users to find the information they want.
Figure 1: The New conversation button shows up in the Teams user interface