Suggestions for an UI expressing "everything is a room"

r4dh4l commented 5 years ago

Hi,

the current UI design (even the new one introduced with 1.0.0) seems to unnecessarily hide the "everything is a room" philosophy of Matrix. Here are some ideas which maybe could help to simplify in the UI in long term:

Room creation

New issue: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/22393

I think it would much better to just offer a + symbol instead of the current 3 buttons ("Start chat", "Room directory", "Create room"). The + then offers:

create a room just for me (room symbol could be my avatar)
create a room for me and another user (with a second question, if just the creator or both users should be admins or just keeping it the way that both are admins; room symbol could be a combination of both user avatars, maybe two avatar circles where my own one is pointing to the addressed one: o -> o)
create a room for me and multiple users (room symbol could be a circle of all avatar circles in the room. like "pearl necklace", maybe with my one in the middle if I'm the creator/owner or a custom avatar like now)
join an existing room (offering to inupt the room ID or to choose from a list of public rooms)

There should be a hint like "In Matrix everything is managed in rooms. You can have a room just for yourself, for you and another person and for a group of people - flexible to adjust the amount of people any time.

This would solve the problem that a "Start chat" currently confuses all people I introduced into Matrix/Riot because you can invite more than one person in the end of the dialogue. I know that the development of Riot wanted to use structures the majority of people know from common instant messengers but it is better to explain new users one time that "everything is a room" so that it makes not much sense to distinguish between single and group chat rooms.

Notication indicator

New issue: https://github.com/vector-im/element-meta/issues/1263

Another idea just came up: Please add a small symbol to the room avatar indicating the notification level.

Room categories/filters

New issue: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/22392

Furthermore the sections "People", "Rooms" and "Low Priority" make not much sense because as far as I watched people using Riot they accidently move "rooms" to "people" and "people" to "rooms". Same with "low priority" which has, as far as I noticed, no effect on the notification settings and is just another category. The category concept work when you have only a small amount of contacts but with 30+ contacts you have to use the "filter room names" so why not using filters instead in the first place? Some examples for useful standard filters would be:

show all rooms created by me
show all rooms with me as only participant
show all rooms with me as only participant and bots
show all rooms with just me an another participant
show all rooms with multiple participants
show all rooms marked as favorite
show all rooms marked as "low priority"
show all rooms with notification level "all messages (noisy)"
show all rooms with notification level "all messages"
show all rooms with notification level "mute"
show all rooms I left (historical)

t3chguy commented 2 years ago

@gsouquet I think spotlight would close this

germain-gg commented 2 years ago

It looks like you have 3 issues encompassed into one here. I'd suggest you open separate issues for the "notification indicator" and another one for the "room categories/filter".

We're currently re-thinking how the home page works, and I have created https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/22095 Looping @niquewoodhouse in as he might be interested in the ideas you've raised here

r4dh4l commented 2 years ago

It looks like you have 3 issues encompassed into one here. I'd suggest you open separate issues for the "notification indicator" and another one for the "room categories/filter".

Done:

Small symbol next to room avatar indicating the notification level: https://github.com/vector-im/element-meta/issues/1263
Adjust room creation process to the "everything is a room" concept: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/22393
Adjust UI to the "everything is a room" concept: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/22392

element-hq / element-web

Suggestions for an UI expressing "everything is a room" #8771