Google Chat makes it much faster and easier to create group conversations on the fly

In the past, creating a group chat required you to spin up a conversation with one individual co-worker or colleague and then add everyone else afterward via the “Start group conversation” button on that person’s DM. The problem with this is that it wasn’t just annoying and tedious, it made literally no sense from a UX standpoint.

Thanks to a new change announced on the Workspace Updates blog yesterday, that’s finally changing. As you can see in the image below, Google is leaving the contact selection field open to more recipients until you click the “Start chat” button instead of automatically creating the conversation after the first person is selected.

This means that you can click away in order to add more of your folks in rapid succession before getting started. If you’d like to remove someone from the lineup before confirming, just click their smart contact chip to reverse your decision.

This flow is no longer one-on-one, but rather one-on-many, which is a breath of fresh air given how most people probably use Chat for work and school. More intuitive UI choices on Google’s behalf mean you’ll enjoy using it more. This change does not apply to Spaces creation.

All Workspace customers, legacy G Suite, and personal Google Account users will see this update rather soon. In fact, anyone with a personal account or Rapid Release domain should already be able to perform this action. If you’re rocking a Scheduled Release domain for your organization, group creation improvements will begin to appear on February 3rd and take up to two weeks.