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element-hq / element-meta

Shared/meta documentation and project artefacts for Element clients
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Info architecture #56

Closed nadonomy closed 1 year ago

nadonomy commented 2 years ago

Quick links

Overview

Through continued development, testing, and research we've encountered usability snags we've been unable to improve within the scope of past projects. To solve these issues, we need to make broader, holistic changes to our information architecture (or, in laypersons terms: app layouts).

Problems we're solving ### Problem 1. **Navigating the app isn't intuitive** as we've built debt over time, with feature development generally empathizing with complex use cases at the expense of simpler ones. 2. **Cross-platform implementations vary** muddying any mental models or muscle memory for users. 3. **Our app layouts don't scale** with our future needs.
Goals of the project ### Goals 1. **Learn for the future** by building a clearer understanding of our varied userbase, and workflows. 2. **Increase ease of use and usability** ensuring content is easy to first discover continually re-discover. 3. **Meet simple user needs and expectations out of the box** letting users grow into committed actions over time.
Out of scope ### Out of Scope 1. **Lengthy 'blue sky' reimagining.** We're biasing for action, learning from small changes and experiments. We'd like our highest-impact changes to confidently live on production before year-end. 2. **Shocking users with large change.** Surprises are fun, but we think we risk eroding trust if we change too much too suddenly or often. 3. **Designing from the gut, or for the loudest voices.** We know our userbase is complex, so we need to listen to a wide range of feedback and validate our findings with testing and research.
People and roles involved ### People and roles * **Kat \(Product\):** Driving the project & product thinking. * **Nique \(Design\):** Advocating for & responsible for all things design. Producing design assets, pairing closely with eng. User research & testing. * **James \(Eng Manager\):** Ensuring delivery is feasible, and efficient. Having opinions. * **Michael \(Web\):** Pairing on discovery for Web, and implementing changes. Once we've progressed through Phase I on web \(timelines below\) we'll also closer loop in Danielle \(who spiked the initial [IA brief](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18qa5yzNQVYRr_Zyt3FdZ7rOXO6vwJ82tbvtQmurYfhY/edit#gid=1794807528) too!\) and the mobile app teams, as they may have bandwidth to action high impact changes too.

Feature lifecycle

To optimise for the velocity of learning, we'll consider the following feature lifecycles for this project: Concept, discovery, and build.

More details ### Concept - Initial concepts from product & design to spike discussion with engineering - Issues, napkins, low fidelity comps ### Discovery - Fleshing out concepts with engineering - Issues, mid-fidelity comps - While in discovery, issues will be: - Merged to develop to avoid bitrot - Labs flagged - Enabled by default for low-risk changes - Disabled by default for destructive or high-risk changes - Rapidly user-tested & iterated on ### Build - Once we have high confidence in issues in discovery, we'll then build the findings for production - Issues capturing conclusions from testing & iteration - Hi-fidelity comps in Figma, mature enough to use as acceptance criteria

Tasks & timeline

Timeline 2021-2022 * October 2021 * Kicked off discovery & development on Web. * November: * Web: Testing & iterating on Phase I. Shipping findings from Phase I to production. Discovery for Phase II & III. * Mobile: Kicking off designs. Validating with dev if resources available. * December * Web: Shipping highest impact changes to production from all learnings. * Mobile: TBD, pending resources. * January 2022 * Web: iterate on IA1, kick off IA2 design and development * iOS: Kicking off designs and metrics instrumentation. Validating with dev if resources available * Android: Kick off metrics instrumentation, learn from iOS progress We'll use bullets in this section below as placeholders of intent, maturing into issues when we commit to doing a piece of work. When wrapping this project, we should comb through notes in this epic to break out any useful notes or thinking into issues in our tracker.

Web

Phases I, II, III & IV.

iOS

Android

Mobile holistically

nadonomy commented 2 years ago

Quick notes from a sync with @niquewoodhouse & @t3chguy, to update in issues:

adrm commented 2 years ago

Just out of curiosity, could it be possible to see some screenshots of those Figma designs? It seems the link is not public.

nadonomy commented 2 years ago

Just out of curiosity, could it be possible to see some screenshots of those Figma designs? It seems the link is not public.

Would love to open up Figma docs directly, but unfortunately project permissions are too leaky. It's possible to browse unrelated, confidential docs and comments.

Issues linked to from this epic do include screenshots and more in depth descriptions though.

HarHarLinks commented 2 years ago

Somewhere between spotlight and the point "Settings" under future, I hope enabling search for all settings can fit in somewhere https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/9592 https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/20625

daniellekirkwood commented 2 years ago

@nadonomy As this is not actively being worked on anymore, do you think we've completed this epic, and we can close it? Or should we move it back to the Product Pipeline Concept column to pick up later?

kittykat commented 1 year ago

I'm going to close this issue for now, please re-open if it's still useful :+1: