Open ara4n opened 6 years ago
FWIW the way I'm picturing it in my head is something like:
Canonical alias for the room?: [___] Secondary aliases (anyone can add a secondary alias for this room, but they aren't used to identify the room)?: View/edit secondary aliases
we should steer users into setting canonical aliases for rooms (so they can be used as identifiers in the UI if an m.room.name hasn't been set for whatever reason)
Synced with @ara4n IRL to clarify my understanding of this - the intention is that we should opportunistically fall back on aliases when a room name hasn't been set (not that we should encourage alias use primarily in order to have a backup in case a room name hasn't been set).
There are two phases to this problem I think:
Tackling the first of those, I think we could get a lot of milage out of just setting a sensible default alias. This could be derived:
Looking at the medium term, I think there's a lot that is suboptimal about our current UX:
I think what I would like to see is:
I think the term 'alias' should be purged as much as possible - it's not an analogue that in any way aids understanding of the underlying concepts.
I've triaged this as a p1 major ui/ux bug because I think we could improve UX materially by addressing the immediate problem of somehow making more rooms have aliases set.
If we get a chance to make the immediate improvements, we should definitely consider with what priority we tackle the medium term bits.
The immediate problem is dealt with:
Currently the canonical alias is set through a dropdown as a bit of an afterthought (even though it is now set implicitly when the user adds aliases for the first time, since https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/2171).
@erikjohnston points out that we should steer users into setting canonical aliases for rooms (so they can be used as identifiers in the UI if an m.room.name hasn't been set for whatever reason), so instead perhaps we should make the main text field be prompting for the canonical_alias (and then have the list of alternative aliases as very much a secondary feature).
Would need UX design.