Product Terminology - Testing

[MirekKolaja]

• [x] - Finalise the testing preparation - by 11th October
• [x] - Send out the testing - by 13th October
• [x] - Testing round open - until 6th November
• [x] - Testing summary + proposal 14th November

[emilvincentz]

Links to: Related / Sub / Recommended spaces - labelling issues

Rethink the "no parent space selected" labelling

[MirekKolaja]

The listed issues are summarised in Product's IA. The proposed solutions can be found here.

[gnunicorn]

Fimga is terrible for discussions, so I'll post my remarks about these terms and their ideas here. First and foremost, I do not think, the wordings is just about a terminology, "what sounds better" or looks good but that the primary question should be: What do we want to convey? What do we think this is, by its nature, and how do we want the people to use the thing. What are the associations with a specific term, what pictures and feelings does it invoke? What do others call the thing, what do they call other things. Familiarity is important, but can also be very misleading (as I will show below). I feel that is largely lacking from the descriptions and pro-cons on the listing.

Chats:

• channel: I have a significant distaste for "channel". Purely from the origin of the word: a channel is a stream of some sort (think of "river" and "channels"), in the world of media a stream of content - A TV Channel - that you tune into. It comes, it flows, whether you are there or not. You consume it. You are passive. That does make sense for the world of discord, with its history as the team-speak-platform of video games, where you just tune in and have it open in the background, listening to each each other. But also in the corporate world of slack-team-chats, where they replace the cc-reply-to-all-email-stuff, and you have to be present in a lot of channels at all times and passively know about the stuff that is going on. Channel implies generally a few-to-many often uni-directional communication (as in Telegram for example) and a constant flow, whether you participate or not ("News Channel").
• group: Only makes sense in contract to direct-message and thus is often used in the context where the app started with 1-on-1-message to indicate that this now contains a group of people. But the term is vague and unclear in both the technical field ( think "Facebook Groups" and "Google Groups" both are closer to what we have as spaces than to what is a direct conversation chat we are talking about here) as well as outside of it in the real life: a group is just a collection of individuals. It doesn't even necessary do anything. Any collection of more than 5 individuals counts as a group. It sure doesn't imply any sort of specific activity happening in that group or with its participants. I find that term way to vague and unclear to mean anything. "Group chat" could be possible, but then again, the "group" in that is just redundant.
• room: Takes the same approach as "group" but rather than using the metric of humans, uses the spacial system to navigate its meaning. Here, too, does it make sense when you go back and look for the origin of the term in this context: In the golden days of IRC you joined a server and on that you could join specific (many) chat rooms - older TV and Movies still quote that. Back in the day without constant internet, you were joining a room only when you were connected, and by disconnecting you'd leave the room. Same as in real life. And same as in real life, you'd only know of the conversations while you were there. There was no continuous being in a room, there was no such thing as room-history. If you wanted that, you'd have to create extra services - like a log bot or an IRC-bouncer - to stay in the room and record things. Matrix coming from the same tradition using the same wording does make some sense, but I think the analogy has run its course: People don't have to be connected anymore, they can read up later. At the same time, they are always sort-of connected. the "room" has lost most of its similarity to a real-world room and is only a shell for the place where the conversation takes place. No serious chat tool talks about "rooms" anymore.
• chat: For me, this is the overarching, natural term either way and for casual usage no other term is used - even in context of slack, you'll find a bunch of people saying "they wrote it in random chat" and everyone immediately understands them. There is no confusion what this is, and what happens there (unlike room or group). Furthermore it implies active participation. Chat - or Conversation, but that word is to long - is a lot more informal, is personal, direct. You also "join" a chat and - as in real life - you don't stand there awkwardly but you participate. And that is ultimately what we want. We already offer the less-interactive news-feed-channel-equivialent. We don't want people to just hang around in various channels where nothing happens or they don't participate in. Reducing noise means we want them to be in the least number of chats as feasible, but those they actively engage in. This also feeds back the other way: with fewer people in each channel, it is more likely they do read the message and they do engage. And whether or not a single thing is called a chat and whether that repeats with the overarching name of the feature - from a user perspective - doesn't really matter, I think. No one cares and it is very rare that we actively call the single thing anything anywhere in the UI. But "please select a Chat or DM" sounds fine to me. Everyone will understand what we want from them.

Space Chats / Space Channels / A chat connected to a/some space(s): There is the undeclared-why strong sentiment that we need to name a chat that is somehow connected to a space something else or specific for some reason. I disagree on that base premise. For two reasons: a) people don't care: if it shows up in a chat, it's a chat; b) we already show a clear icon that is a cleaner and better visual clue about its status than giving it any particular made-up-name and c) they are not inherently different, nor should they be. Quite the opposite, a chat may or may not be connected to any number of spaces, and they may or may not allow participation based on the membership to another space, but they are not different in any other way. One particular reason, I would not give them a name, is that it implies a stronger relationship - one close to an Event or Pin, which is bound to a space - that they don't have. Unlike Pin or Event they can be shared between spaces on the same or different levels. They are not under a space. "Space Chat" implies a form of ownership that is not enforced.

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Pins:

We unfortunately didn't get around to speak about the Pin-Feature during the product session earlier this year and that falls onto our feet now. I think there seems to be a fundamental disconnect what this feature is about. Which lead to various cycles of implementation back-and-forth and a lack of clarity what it does, including the expected misunderstanding by users what this is.

The basic idea is copied from the likes of chat messenger like telegram or forums like discourse (Matrix also has support for it but Element never got it out of the experimental labs), where users with special privileges can pin certain messages to the top of the screen. Thus allowing to highlight and give quick access to specific items which are otherwise hard to find in the continuous stream of content, but need to be know or looked up frequently. Once you abstract away from the single chat room, you can think of it as the pin wall/pin board or the fridge with the magnets and sticky noes with the most important phones numbers of the doctor, aunt mary, the pin code of the storage locker lock so on.

In the context of a social group, this can be equated to the same idea, if you have a shared space, it might contain the plan for trash collection or code for the lock of the garage. In online communities, this contains a brief code-of-conduct and link to further information and similar rules that apply, but also links to other external source.

The key point of this place is to hold the most important information to easily scan on a glance. Thus it is inherently one-dimensional (no folders) while you might want to have a search for it, you usually want to limit the number of items here. It is not an archive, and it is not usually the place to store in-work documents or drafts. The objects in there rarely change.

I don't see why we would want to call that anything but "Pin"(s). It is exactly that skeuomorphism that makes it able to for the user to understand the meaning.

Now, why then do other users suggest we should call that something else? Their own bias and experience(s), of course. One prominent example comes to mind, where someone, usually using "Microsoft Teams" suggested we should call it "Resources". Which makes total sense as the other tab in Microsoft teams mobile is for "Files" (in some screenshots sometimes called "drive" or "resources"). [unrelated side-note: in Microsoft Teams they call a chat "conversation" and they happen within a "channel" - which is most akin to our space-named object - all within an organization. Just about consistency of naming things.] Remember: Microsoft teams is a cloud storage provider with chat bolted on-top. Of course they have "Resources" plugged there. But that is not only named differently, that is a completely different feature. It's a full blown storage solution with folders and files and word-editor and all that stuff. It is no wonder they might confuse our feature with the thing they are familiar with, but they think of something else.

This example is one that makes me even more convinced that we shouldn't use any generic term like Materials, Resources, Files or similar, as that probably calls the wrong associations and then people ask for missing features in it, we don't want to have. We don't want to have folders, as that will decrease the ability to quickly glance over it. We don't want this to become a stop-all-archive, like a google drive or something.

[emilvincentz]

@gnunicorn I understand the distaste for channel due to its origin. However what I think should value higher than the direct meaning of a words origin, is the usability and familiarity and intuitiveness. I did a quick search in the matrix room/chats/channel that im part of and most (including our team and yourself tend to use the name "channel" when referring to a "room" or "chat"). Sometimes the most logical one is not the intuitive one = what the user behaviour actually shows.

Here are some quick screenshot examples

xamples:

Even in your comment above, you also use "channel", when augmenting for "chat".

For me it's not important that "channel" necessarily wins. Whats important is that we look at user behaviour and use that to select the right terminology and not just based on ones subjective dislike of the origin. If we talk about chat (chattering) and its origin, its not quite positive in this context either;)

[gnunicorn]

I did a quick search in the matrix room/chats/channel that im part of and most (including our team and yourself tend to use the name "channel" when referring to a "room" or "chat"). Sometimes the most logical one is not the intuitive one = what the user behaviour actually shows.

Here are some quick screenshot examples

Did you also search for "chat", "room" or similar? If not, I call confirmation bias. If you did (I don't have element desktop and can't do a full-text search), how do the stacks stake up (not that it really matters, as we have a strong selection bias either way)?

re 1. screenshot: Counter to what you think you argue, that is actually referring to a one-to-many-post channel that no one else can post in. It is, by its nature, exactly that channel I am referring to. It is the more specific term than room, used appropriately and exactly in the argument I was making. You picked the wrong example. Side note on that argument: I am also referring to "news bulletin" in there, which I still consider the better term (but I don't really care), and probably will be using to refer to the specific thing internally for the time being, but I doubt that you'd would accept this screenshot as an argument for changing the name of that, because me using it once is a pretty weak argument... 🤷

If we talk about chat (chattering) and its origin, its not quite positive in this context either;)

re 4. screenshot: (please provide links, so one can read the source and the entire context). That screenshot isn't really making the case you are thinking of making. As the second sentence right after the one you highlighted explains: "chatter in its modern form has a slightly different meaning from chat". As I lack the actual source, I can't confirm what it says "chat" means in modern day, but I assume it means "having a conversation with someone". Either way, I was never talking about the deep root origins of a word, I was referring to the images it invokes in the readers minds and its common usage inside and outside the context we are in, today. The origins just inform us, why certain associations might come up. I never suggested we use "chatter", for the same reason that "channel" is not a good word, it implies (in its modern wording) a constant stream of (mostly unimportant) information one may or may not listen into.

re 3. screenshot: I never argued that colloquially these aren't interchangeable, and that people (including myself) might refer to any of that as any of these names (room, channel, chat, stream, category, DMs, conversation - yes, "conversation"*), sometimes even wrong ones (threads, forum, discussions). But your argument that it more common lacks any evidence. As said before, I think that it is largely informed by a selection bias of a subset of clients, you/we are used to using.

The evidence points to quite the opposite actually; With over 2 billion active monthly users, WhatsApp kills the usage IRC, discord and any team chat system combined. It is by far the most used DM and chat app; and they call it "Chats", see screenshot. The common term, most known to most users, by the numbers is Chats (used on the start screen, even in the German translation - and confusingly, the settings referred to 'Groups' some times). No matter what I or someone else might have referred to them at any point in time, or what we feel is "better", there is a rather compelling reason that most people will intuitively use the word "chat" rather than "channel" based purely on what they are used to.

I am not particuarly fond of the "most users think" argument, as I don't think this is how we should inform our decision (primarily). But as you keep bringing that up, I just wanted to clarify that the idea that "channel" is the most term for this lacks the evidence, while "chat" has a strong case for being the winner on that argument. Despite what you or I might personally think is "is the usability and familiarity and intuitiveness" of a term (see "news bulletin").

I understand the distaste for channel due to its origin.

I do not have a distaste because of its origin. I think my argument was not understood correctly. I argue that it is a bad word because it has a meaning we do not want to have associated - even if that term is used to describe similar things in communication technology (TV Channel, Radio Channel, but also Walky-Talky-Channels - most of the time referring to a specific band of radio frequencies) and there is a better, commonly - arguably even more - used term, that does evoke the images and emotions we want and we should opt for instead.

I am making the argument, over all, that other that naming things according to what we feel is the common term (the evidence above shows that "channel" probably even isn't), that we think about the meaning of the words we give things and ask whether we think it is the right meaning ascribed to it. In there, the origins of a word might help us understand why certain associations arise and it evokes certain emotions - why it feels "warm" or "cold".

In general, in tech, we tend to use technical terms that describe the inherent properties of the thing or use a term that loosely conveys these properties from an tangent field: "channel" in communication stems from its property of being way of transimission, and then refer to subset or property changes to as in relation to that, like baseband channel, multi-plex or unidirectional channel. I think, while these terms make sense to an engineer, because they understand what it is and like the specificity of it, these things mean nothing to most average people.

Using these terms, that have little to no actual meaning to most non-technical people, makes the App cold and technical. Instead, I'd argue, we want to evoke emotions and give thing intuitive meaning. I argue, we should not name things for what they look like (inherent [meta-]physical properties) but what they mean to people. Thus, we should look at every term closely, about its meaning, the emotions and images it evokes, even if that means questioning what we believe the most used name for a thing might be.

Mind, that I am not dismissing that what it is named elsewhere. I think that is important and can inform us about the change of meaning of word or its association and feelings towards it for people. In this case, however, I highly doubt that "channel" used elsewhere in tech has had a change on the perception of the word and the images it evokes. Either way, it is one aspect, and especially when we have competing terms, the one that evokes the emotions and images with user we want is simply better to me.

From that point of view, chat or conversation wins over channel every time.

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Sorry if this comes off as rambling. I tried shortening it, but it is hard to get that point of view across... I would have written less if I had more time...

* Conversation : I grew up with ICQ and there it was called a "conversation", later I was a lot on IRC where it is a "channel"

[MirekKolaja]

Test was created and finalized on Optimal Workshop. Jules was informed and sent link to and on Thursday it will be sent out to the people on the waitlist

Here is the link to the test: https://ows.io/os/8x5z3y9x

[MirekKolaja]

Testing round is closed as of now. Now it's time to summarize the results and prepare proposals to changes.

The total amount of results it 9. There are definitely a few patterns visible at first sight, so we are definitely getting closer to the product labels that will be the best match for our users.

[MirekKolaja]

The handover that summarises the test results is ready and can be found here