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element-hq / element-meta

Shared/meta documentation and project artefacts for Element clients
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Presence display ideas #2456

Open ghost opened 4 years ago

ghost commented 4 years ago

I'm not a UX/UI designer, so these are kinda just opinions of mine that I'm throwing at the wall here.

I'm not a huge fan of the presence lamps in the room list, and I think they could be a lot better. My main issue right now is that they're super basic.

Three basic states: offline, online, away All of these are just displayed as the same circle in the same shape and spot, but just a different color.

I think presence should be way more noticeable than just a tiny bubble with a colour. Here are some ideas.

  1. Decolour the avatar and grey out the text. image (from element's current "Members" list in a room) image (from Steam Chat)

  2. Change the text for certain states could do a few things here, i.e. formatting, colour, contrast, etc. Steam Chat gives me ideas.

  3. Room list reordering Maybe the room list could be sorted by presence, where online users are first and offline users are last.

  4. Textual indicators Display "Online"/"Away"/"Offline" where the message previews would be in the room list. Could also be a good place to put custom user statuses. Maybe the user could choose to display statuses instead of message previews.

  5. Use symbols/icons instead of coloured circles. i.e. an "I" and "O" for Online and Offline respectively, like an "I/O" switch.

  6. etc...

Another thing, I think all of this should be optional. Presence is not universal with all servers, so there should be an option to disable all of this if you A) use a HS that disallows presence entirely or B) have many users who do not use presence, since they are using said HS.

t3chguy commented 4 years ago

Another thing, I think all of this should be optional. Presence is not universal with all servers, so there should be an option to disable all of this if you A) use a HS that disallows presence entirely

If your server has presence disabled and your Element knows about it (via config.json) it will not show the presence. https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/blob/develop/docs/config.md

Servers do not tell their users that they have presence disabled in any meaningful way at this time.

ghosty-be commented 9 months ago

the problem is on a server that has presence disabled that the whole people list is greyed out... (as offline) that is hard to read and has low contrast vs a dark theme... so this is not a wanted behavior either I find?

t3chguy commented 9 months ago

@ghosty-be you should configure your client to tell it that the server is doing such a spec non-compliant mod via the config enable_presence_by_hs_url

ara4n commented 9 months ago

(oops fatfinger)