Left/navigation sidebar: chat/room folders, and information density

[Nyco]

Two related concernes.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. The left sidebar containing all rooms/chats can become quite large quickly. With its low density and inline organisation it is painful to navigate and organise.

• Density Talk is reusing the UI and information density that is used in personal instant messaging apps: each entry is large/high.

Modern enterprise/team-oriented instant messaging apps such as Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, Slack, Discord, MS Teams, all use a denser list of chats/rooms: entries are much smaller, which allows the user to see more.

Talk belongs to the latter generation and should use that modern, defacto standard UI pattern: higher density (smaller items).

• Flat organisation A flat list is useless when the number grows past the screen (browser window) size, since it is difficult to find your rooms.

Favorites help but that is limited.

A tree view can definitely help: a user could put his rooms into folders, as they wish.

Describe the solution you'd like

• Organise chats and rooms as two-level tree view (folders/containers), that user can fold and unfold
• Densify the display by reducing the vertical size of each channel (remove preview text)

Describe alternatives you've considered Workspaces are another indirection level that user generally don't like.

Additional context This is the result of user research and user test campaign we ran last year.

Picture worth 1000 words

• On the left: large, flat
• On the right: narrow, tree

Note Telegram has designed and started to deliver the "Chat folders" feature: https://telegram.org/blog/folders It is available both on mobile and desktop/web. For now is it difficult to find how to set those folders up. But using them on a day to day basis is super useful and productive. I believe they will improve that feature over time iteratively.

Warning Do not fall in the trap of threads (Slack/Mattermost) and topics (Zulip).

[nickvergessen]

Related #2448 and #1470

[Nyco]

Maybe this ticket can split in two:

• Left/navigation sidebar: chat/room folders
• Left/navigation sidebar: higher information density

[nickvergessen]

Closing as per above