CyberShadow
commented
1 year ago I filed a proposal in #24802 to provide an alternative design to the double-sidebar room navigation in Element (Web/Desktop). Since it's requesting the same thing as this issue, I'm copying the text here with the hope that it will add to future conversations.
Most IRC clients, as well as many desktop IM applications, provide navigation (for their equivalent of rooms) using a tree or tree-like control:
 Convos |
 HexChat |
 IceChat |
 KVIrc |
 Miranda IM |
 mIRC |
 Pidgin |
 Relay |
 Smuxi |
I think it would be great to have an option in Element to replace the double sidebars with such a navigation control. Perhaps (optimistically), it may even prove to be more popular and accessible than the current approach to navigation; especially for users of nested spaces, or users of bridges which create nested spaces, such as mautrix-discord.
Some goals for a tree-based navigation in Element could be:
- Rooms are arranged into a nested tree, according to their spaces / meta-spaces topology.
- Rooms and spaces are presented as one line in the tree, with both the icon and the name (as in most of the screenshots above).
- Categories of rooms within a space (e.g. "Low priority") would form another, bottom-level tree node.
- Non-leaf nodes can be collapsed to save vertical space.
- It should probably be possible to rearrange rooms using drag-and-drop.
Some advantages of tree-based navigation:
- The room topology is presented clearly in its entirety.
- All rooms are visible just by scrolling, and accessible with one click (provided that no nodes are collapsed).
Some disadvantages of the double-sidebar navigation (compared to tree-based navigation):
- It copies too much from Discord's UI. Users who have not used Discord may not be familiar or productive with this UI.
- It relies too much on the space icon for navigation. Spaces must have sufficiently unique and recognizable icons (incl. to users with color-blindness) to be reasonably accessible.
- When both sidebars are expanded, they use too much horizontal space.
- UX of nested spaces is quite poor with the current UI. To get to a sub-space when starting with a collapsed left-most sidebar, one has to click the tiny arrow near the top-level space, which expands the sidebar, then click the sub-space, then re-collapse the left sidebar to bring it back to the original (collapsed) state.
Your use case
What would you like to do?
Why would you like to do it?
In the past I got used to the custom tags labs feature to organize my rooms. Maybe I just don't use spaces in the right way, but I am struggling to be absolutely happy with the new spaces UI, introducing a 4 column layout (reducing actual screen space for messages).
I tried to replace the custom tags by a tree of private spaces, which is awesome. But I find myself having to constantly switch between different spaces in order to know whats going on in which rooms. If a room needs my attention I have to click twice, first on the space to reveal the room list, then on the room to show the messages.
The custom tags feature allowed to have some "group of rooms" collapsed and other more important ones expanded and immediately see if some important room needs my attention. This feature is missing now.
How would you like to achieve it?
Option 1 would just show rooms in the spaces tree view as it is done for sub-spaces. The avatar shape should allow to differentiate between the two types. If spaces are leaf-spaces the would also allow to be expanded and collapsed to show and hide rooms on demand.
Option 2 would completely merge the missing rest of the UI elements into the spaces panel and hide the room list. Home could be made expandable and contain expandable People and Rooms section that would show what normally would be shown in the room list for Home.
The only downside I see with option 2, is that People are not grouped in the spaces. They could still be shown under Home > People (for notifications) and in the right side panel to see who is a member of a space. I think the grouping of people is less important for me than grouping rooms, so I could live with this.
This is how I imagine it could look like:
This is how it looks now for reference:
Have you considered any alternatives?
Additional context
I was really hoping that spaces will replace the custom tags labs feature. Somehow I think the 3 predefined tags (Favorites, Rooms and Low priority) will not be enough for me.