Space home vs all feedback

[t3chguy]

Use the emoji reactions on this issue to vote for your preference

🚀 Home = Invites, Favourites, DMs, Orphans (High SNR)
❤️ Home = All rooms
👀 Home = User preference of 🚀 / ❤️
🎉 Home = Like 👀 but a user could choose both at the same time, thus having a separate meta-space for "All Rooms" and a separate one for "High SNR"

[thibaultamartin]

My current personal usage is:

• join many rooms
• figure some can be grouped
• add those in spaces
• switch to home for the “impossible to sort”

Home with everything kinda defeats the point of Spaces for my personal usage. One of the appeals of Spaces for me is the ability to bring order to a large number of rooms.

[WolvenMoonstone]

Having introduced many people from discord to matrix I've found that the current functionality (High SNR) is much easier and intuitive for them then with the "all" home which is closer to how communities v1 originally functioned. i think the main reason for all the confusion is from people using the original communities feature and not having it explained to them clearly enough how the new home functioned.

I reccomend that we keep the High SNR functionality for people at least as a default as it is easier for newcomers to matrix and if people insist on the "all rooms" dynamic that we leave it as an option..

[frandavid100]

I have to disagree. I have introduced a few friends and family members to Element (and also to spaces) and the current behaviour creates a layer of complexity that they don't want, because they can no longer find some rooms just by clicking the Rooms tab; instead they must click the Hamburger menu, find the proper space, click it and then click the Rooms tab.

Most of them come from apps like Whatsapp or Telegram, and are used to a single list showing all their conversations. And they have repeatedly told me how much they dislike having to go through all these steps just to find a room.

[t3chguy]

The "all" things with the communities was confusing, frustrating, unintuative and upsetting upon moving to Matrix.
Group chats and categorized spaces in a similar way to discord, like a collection of interconnected message boards/forums, is much more intuative and fosters communication and cohesive community building. Something more similar to a high SNR structure is a more intuative extension of the way we compartmentalize our interests than anything I've experienced so far in the setup of V1 communities. There's no sense of unity or flow or connection. I don't feel like a member or participant, it's very lonely and people and other parts of the supposed grouped and connected community feel distant and chilled. Why would I want my community to feel like... not a community? Why would I use an aplication or a platform for social networking if it makes me feel disconnected? It's not a community, it's a filter. It's a collection. not a group or a community.
What I miss from discord that I really enjoy is the VERY heavy slant the app has toward a building of interpersonal relationships. Unlike something like facebook or twitter where it's a passive experience it is active. It's a massive scrolling shared group message similar to what we have here. However if I want to change from, say, a channel discussing photography to a channel discussing the philosophical concept of maths I can just scroll up on discord and I haven't gone anywhere, it feels like the exact same place. However here I have to leave and go to a new place. It's not connected. Additionally, I miss the structure of voice channels.
More than that, the friends feature on discord promotes the formations of individual rapport and close interpersonal bonds, whereas the design here is less... close. An individual you talk with is treated similarly to your engagement or participation in a group making the interaction seem more formal and distant. You don't have friends, here everyone is a stranger.
I like the way servers, channels, and chats are kind of nested into one another on discord like a russian doll. The language used is maybe not what tech people here are used to, "server" on discord means something else, and that's another point. I'm not a developer, I don't program apps. The most I do is use python to sort through large data sets. But element and matrix seem to be designed to exclude people who aren't as technically inclined, which is unfortunate considering that it is the most outsider friendly security focussed platform. As I understand it, a main goal of the team is to make all of this more accessible and user-friendly, and in that light moving away from from High SNR is moving in the wrong direction.
I think that's most of it.

- Pandoras_Box in the feedback room

[robintown]

I think the core of the issue here is that spaces get used in two different ways: spaces that just group together existing rooms, and spaces whose rooms canonically belong to them / only make sense in the context of the space (pretty sure this has been articulated before).

To reflect this dichotomy of usage I would suggest as an alternative: If a room has a canonical parent space of which you are a member, hide it from home. Otherwise, include it in home. This ensures that Slack/Discord-style spaces work as expected for people coming from those platforms, while a filter-style view is retained for those rooms that don't ask to be hierarchically organized.

[t3chguy]

If a room has a canonical parent space of which you are a member, hide it from home. Otherwise, include it in home.

I think this would feel even more inconsistent than either of the current proposed options. It'd be even harder to know what to expect in Home without giving serious thought to each of your spaces and their rooms.

[frandavid100]

My current personal usage is:

* join many rooms

* figure some can be grouped

* add those in spaces

* switch to home for the “impossible to sort”

Home with everything kinda defeats the point of Spaces for my personal usage. One of the appeals of Spaces for me is the ability to bring order to a large number of rooms.

Can't you create a private 'Miscellaneous' space to group those impossible to sort rooms?

[WolvenMoonstone]

I have to disagree. I have introduced a few friends and family members to Element (and also to spaces) and the current behaviour creates a layer of complexity that they don't want, because they can no longer find some rooms just by clicking the Rooms tab; instead they must click the Hamburger menu, find the proper space, click it and then click the Rooms tab.

Most of them come from apps like Whatsapp or Telegram, and are used to a single list showing all their conversations. And they have repeatedly told me how much they dislike having to go through all these steps just to find a room.

It seems to me there is a rift here between two paradigms that are at odds here

The Soft Grouping paradigm (Eg: WhatsApp):
Every room is separate self-contained and displayed in a flat list structure. It's all there, everything is just in the "all" home. the user doesn't need to know where the chats are but communities are mostly limited to single rooms. a High SNR home could be seen as unnessasary In this use case. the spaces act as filters similar to a category search. Future features (such as flairs) would go mostly unused.

The Hard Grouping paradigm (Eg: Discord):
Rooms are inherently "inside" a space. Communities are groups of rooms involving related things or have common people. High SNR or similar is used to create community cohesion across a large set of topic-based rooms. Spaces would then be used to visually group the inter-room community into a connected whole. using an "all" home would break this cohesion and result in an overwhelming unwieldy set of rooms. Future space features add quality of life for admins and users.

edits: clarity, spelling, terminology

[AlexiWolf]

Here's what I said in the room. Figured it might be a bit more useful here:

As someone with dyslexia, a hard grouping structure is a HUGE deal for usability. As channels are currently laid out on Element, and on platforms like Telegram, the app quickly becomes unusable because parsing lists to find what I want is near impossible without huge effort.

For example, if there's 5 spaces, with 10 channels each. Presenting all those channels in a list will make the whole thing a blur. It's impossible to find what I'm looking for that way. A hard grouping structure mitigates this problem by condensing lots of related channels into a much smaller list that's easier to look through. Now there are only 5 entries to look through, and if I look in one of the spaces, there's only 10 items. This layout allows me to join many more channels before things become completely unusable. A tree structure is much more intuitive to many more people. That is why so many popular chat / community platforms are starting to follow these same design motifs. This is the same reason file systems switched from being stored as flat lists to trees.

The soft relationship structure in Telegram was the single biggest factor in choosing to leave it, and I'm having the same issue with Element and Matrix. Spaces seems like a promising solution to that problem, and it may be the only reason I was willing to continue using Matrix.

Personally, I feel the best option would be allow the user to chose. Perhaps as a first-start prompt? That way everyone can get what they want. Either way Spaces is capable of doing both, and with Element being the reference implementation for a Matrix chat app, it should also be able to do both.

[frandavid100]

Hi, Alexi.

For example, if there's 5 spaces, with 10 channels each. Presenting all those channels in a list will make the whole thing a blur. It's impossible to find what I'm looking for that way. A hard grouping structure mitigates this problem by condensing lots of related channels into a much smaller list that's easier to look through. Now there are only 5 entries to look through, and if I look in one of the spaces, there's only 10 items.

The thing is, with "all rooms home" you still have those 5 entries; and if you look in any of them, you still have those 10 rooms. It's not like spaces will be removed and you will be forced to find your rooms in a huge list.

You can still use those spaces to organize and find your rooms exactly like you would with "unsorted rooms home". So what's the loss?

[WolvenMoonstone]

Hi, Alexi.

For example, if there's 5 spaces, with 10 channels each. Presenting all those channels in a list will make the whole thing a blur. It's impossible to find what I'm looking for that way. A hard grouping structure mitigates this problem by condensing lots of related channels into a much smaller list that's easier to look through. Now there are only 5 entries to look through, and if I look in one of the spaces, there's only 10 items.

yes but there is a more visual separation of space and home is the default room which can still be overwhelming for some users

The thing is, with "all rooms home" you still have those 5 entries; and if you look in any of them, you still have those 10 rooms. It's not like spaces will be removed and you will be forced to find your rooms in a huge list.

You can still use those spaces to organize and find your rooms exactly like you would with "unsorted rooms home". So what's the loss?

The loss is of the separation of concerns and mental separation of spaces the High SNR home provides

If you really want an unsorted rooms home what's stopping you from making it a private space rather then it being the home?

[th0mcat]

🚀 is my preference and how I will use my Home Space, but 👀 is how it should be implemented in all Element clients.

In addition, I have a suggestion for the Unread tab on the Android app (but could apply to the other Element clients). The Unread tab should contain all unread DMs/rooms for all Spaces. As an end user, it's much easier to

open the app, hit the Unread tab, then select the chat

than to

open the app, hit the hamburger menu, select the space, then select the unread tab, then select the chat

especially for people with large phones or smaller hands. I know this kind of cuts into the whole purpose of Spaces, but it makes the UX a bit easier/friendlier.

[SimonBrandner]

In addition, I have a suggestion for the Unread tab on the Android app (but could apply to the other Element clients). The Unread tab should contain all unread DMs/rooms for all Spaces. As an end user, it's much easier to

I've already filed an issue for that here

[frandavid100]

I completely agree with @thomcatdotrocks that it's easier to reach an unread room if you don't need to open the spaces drawer first; but I think that the same logic applies to all other rooms.

In addition, I see no reason why the Home Space (if that's the name) should:

1. Show all DMs, even if they belong to a space.
2. Show all unread rooms, even if they belong to a space.
3. But hide all other rooms if they belong to a space.

In my opinion, it should always do the same thing; either always show all conversations, or always hide conversations that belong to spaces.

[WolvenMoonstone]

In addition, I see no reason why the Home Space (if that's the name) should:

1. Show all DMs, even if they belong to a space.

DMs don't "belong" to spaces in the same way intuitively we should have a space where dms are listed as in every paradigm. hard or soft grouping people expect a "friends list"

2. Show all unread rooms, even if they belong to a space.

This seems to be more of a notifications implimentation detail then a home or even spaces related issue. I also imagine this could get really cluttered really quickly but we should test that.

3. But hide all other rooms if they belong to a space.

It's called the home because it gives orphaned rooms their own space. For both accessability as mentioned in @AlexiWolf 's and for phychological/usability reasons mentioned by Pandora's Box and or multiple reasons mentioned above I strongly argue we need to hide rooms with a space from home at least by default.

Treating a DM or annother Room the same is entirely an optional design decision. we need to make things work for users first and foremost even if that means we make DM rooms and other rooms diverge a bit.

[frandavid100]

DMs don't "belong" to spaces

They do: you can arbitrarily add a DM to a space, just like you can add any other room.

So the question stands: since both DMs and rooms may belong to spaces... why should we have a space where all DMs are listed, but not have a space where all rooms are listed? What sets them apart and justifies treating them differently?

We need to make things work for users first and foremost even if that means we make DM rooms and other rooms diverge a bit

Showing all DMs on the home screen, but only showing some of the rooms and hiding the rest, is not diverging a bit. It's diverging a lot, in a fundamental way and in the first screen that the user will see. And if it also makes it harder for the user to reach certain rooms, it seems hard to argue that it "makes things work for users first and foremost".

[nadonomy]

Hey all— thanks for the detailed feedback and input so far in this issue and in related rooms. I wanted to add some extra context from internal discussion, ideation and workshopping through the various tradeoffs, to help understand why we're making the decisions we are today like merging this PR on Web:

1. As evidenced from this issue (at the time of writing; considerable votes for all major options, most for a user preference) there's definitely opposing expectations and goals with the functionality of the first tab in the space panel.

2. In principle, we want to meet (and exceed!) expectations from other platforms. One major consideration not discussed in this issue yet which is unique to Matrix & Element is that rooms can belong to multiple spaces. This provides significant challenges around things like:

   1. Filtering— Filtering is global across all spaces, and we know from user research this will need to evolve into a unified search experience across all of rooms, messages, file names, usernames, and so on. If I filter for a room, it belongs to multiple spaces, and then I select it, what happens?
   2. Notifications— If a room belongs to multiple spaces, how do we decorate notification dots and badges? We know from testing that single messages causing multiple notification dots or badges is alarming and we need a way for counts to count up or down predictably.

3. We have no evidence to prove that users conceptually understand and know where to re-discover orphaned rooms in the 'Home' model, which was a major usability concern.

Given all of the above, the least set of tradeoffs we arrived at is to iterate on 'Home' to behave more like 'All'. This affords:

1. Users to build a simpler model of how Matrix actually works under the hood, where rooms can be independent of Spaces.
2. Users to build a mental model closer to email (Starting from 'All' first as it's the simplest most universal truth, to then drill down by category/folder/label if they want to).
3. Us to make better decisions around how notification badges are counted, as it's less surprising for users to see a count increase or decrease per space in chorus with a count in 'All'.
4. Us to make more pragmatic and performant decisions around how filtering works.

We decided on this set of changes holistically, in preparation of a wider beta in the immediacy. In the beta, we're aiming to learn as much as possible with the least amount of tradeoffs.

As we move forward, future considerations will include:

1. More feedback in this issue! 😀
2. What did we get wrong on any of the above?
3. How much of the feedback in this thread is change aversion? What sticks or changes over time after living with the changes?
4. What do we learn from the users who aren't able to participate in this discussion on GitHub, or in the feedback room? (i.e. less technical folk)
5. How might Canonical DMs impact things? Is it more advantageous to have DMs per space?
6. What do we learn from usage of canonical spaces in the wild? Do we need to be more strict on their implementation to meet users expectations from other platforms of rooms belonging to a single space?
7. We think having a high signal:noise place for all DMs is really valuable— it's why we started with it!— but are there implementations which are less binary than the ones discussed here? For example, once subspaces are mature and users are used to that interaction pattern, is it advantageous to replicate it allowing users to filter down from 'All' into 'Direct Messages' or things like 'Unreads' and so on?
8. Other things we haven't learned or thought of yet!

We're definitely invested in getting this right and are listening to the feedback we get here and everywhere else. Like a lot of things though it seems simpler than it is from far away, and is incredibly multi-factorial when considering all of the various goals and dependencies. Definitely looking forward to us iterating on this over time!

[frandavid100]

Hey, Nad. Thanks a lot for keeping us posted.

One major consideration not discussed in this issue yet which is unique to Matrix & Element is that rooms can belong to multiple spaces. This provides significant challenges around things like: Filtering (...) Notifications (...)

I think there is yet another challenge; some of the users who posted here want spaces (or at least some spaces) to have some sort of sense of community. While I disagree with them that "unsorted home" will achieve that, I think it's worth considering. Maybe in the future there could be some special type of space, more similar to a Discord guild, where:

1. Rooms in that space cannot be added to any other space.
2. Rooms in that space don't show up in Home or anywhere else outside the space.
3. Space members automatically join all rooms.

Maybe that could help achieve that sense of community that those people apparently have on Discord and think they'd be missing with the current iteration of spaces. Although it's probably out of the scope of this issue.

We think having a high signal:noise place for all DMs is really valuable— it's why we started with it!— but are there implementations which are less binary than the ones discussed here?

Maybe it would be possible to show spaces as sections in the Home screen, e.g.

1. Have a section at the top showing your favorites and notifications.
2. Right under it, have another section for your first space; showing a handful of its most recent conversations, with a "see more" button that would open the space.
3. Additional sections for the rest of your spaces.
4. At the bottom, one last section for your unsorted rooms.

I feel like that would take away the main problems with the "Unsorted home" approach (e.g. it wouldn't force casual users to open the side panel if they need to find a conversation) and it could also solve the main issues others have with the "All home" approach (e.g. unrelated conversations wouldn't appear next to each other).

I can make a couple mockups, if you guys are interested.

[nadonomy]

I think there is yet another challenge; some of the users who posted here want spaces (or at least some spaces) to have some sort of sense of community. While I disagree with them that "unsorted home" will achieve that, I think it's worth considering. Maybe in the future there could be some special type of space, more similar to a Discord guild, where: (...)

This is what I was alluding to with canonical parents. In principle, we've designed in the same use case you're describing into the spec (MSC1772, search for 'canonical') but in practise it's not as straightforward as:

1. Users want to add existing rooms as it's where their existing community, members and content live.
2. It's difficult to repatriate to our current room-first model, as users expect to be able to continue to share individual rooms, which then creates the orphaned room problem in all cases.
3. I'm fuzzily remembering technical complexity around race conditions of rooms claiming parents & parents claiming children, where we had concerns for stability and performance, exacerbated over federation and on mobile.

We haven't designed it out— we'll return to it with closer detail after learning more from shipping a beta.

Maybe it would be possible to show spaces as sections in the Home screen, e.g. (...)

This is actually where we started. :) Here's a wireframe from a workshop and ideation session last year:

We dismissed it in early prototyping as it was annoying to get multiple notification badges from the same messages or rooms and at the time we had grave usability concerns over the rooms being presented twice, as we were worried it didn't establish a simple enough model for users.

That said (1) it's possible we were too hasty on not sophisticating some of the logic instead (2) as we're continuing to learn about new and potentially greater tradeoffs, this may be the lesser evil & (3) your suggestion on abstracting away most of the space when viewing from Home is a really interesting one.

We'll definitely continue to iterate on this based on the feedback and ideas here and the other things we learn from the beta. Thanks for flagging & keeping us honest!

[SimonBrandner]

I have to admit that I really like the idea of having a filter:

[nadonomy]

I have to admit that I really like the idea of having a filter:

Yeah me too. 😀 The filters aren't the focus of this effort though (we have room list sections which work well enough for most people) but definitely something we'll continue to revisit.

[thibaultamartin]

I'm really pleasantly surprised by the humility of designers at Element. It's difficult to balance opinionated design while listening to feedback, and you seem to do it very well! Keep up the good work!

To expand a little on the list @nadonomy posted, here are my answers. Of course, this is just how I feel about this, and I'm not pretending it's an universal truth.

What did we get wrong on any of the above?

I'm not sure I agree with the mental model close to email. With emails, I get my inbox which contains all the messages I didn't sort in folders already. I don't have an inbox and a copy of the message in a folder.

But to be fair, GMail works (worked? I haven't used it in a while) with a tag system, and not a folder system. The tag system allows you to tag an email, all while keeping it in your inbox.

I'm used to work in zero inbox with email and exclusively use folders. Everything else feels cluttered. That's how I feel about this "All" home space.

How much of the feedback in this thread is change aversion? What sticks or changes over time after living with the changes?

I'm involved in the GNOME community and experienced exactly what you're experiencing with the release of GNOME 40. The workspaces went from vertical to horizontal, and many people got troubled by that.
I'm genuinely trying to live with the "All" space and to understand how it works. It doesn't fit really well with how I see spaces and how I work.

A particular thing that strikes me is I see Spaces as "all the channels an org/project has". If I join the public Spaces of several orgs, the number of channels I'm in will quickly skyrocket, and the "All" Space will become rapidly unusable for me.

How might Canonical DMs impact things? Is it more advantageous to have DMs per space?

I don't have a particular opinion on DMs. I tend to leave DMs on the Home Space.

We think having a high signal:noise place for all DMs is really valuable— it's why we started with it!— but are there implementations which are less binary than the ones discussed here? For example, once subspaces are mature and users are used to that interaction pattern, is it advantageous to replicate it allowing users to filter down from 'All' into 'Direct Messages' or things like 'Unreads' and so on?

No strong opinion on that matter, but I'll be happy to follow your iterations on that bit!

Other things we haven't learned or thought of yet!

It seems public Spaces, "Spaces as the public face of an org" has been a little overlooked in user interactions. Or I simply didn't understand very well the model :D

[SimonBrandner]

So far the biggest problem with the all rooms home space, for me, is that if I do Ctrl+K in the home space and switch to a room that is in a space, I stay in the home space. That basically makes spaces useless while using the keyboard navigation as I never leave the home space...

[WolvenMoonstone]

@nadonomy I feel i need to clarify some things in a public forum as I feel @frandavid100 is misinterpreting arguments about the utility of a High SNR vs an All home.

• Element is intended as a universal chat application as such it has to account for and support many use cases and be as usable as possible.

• The all room is a usability/accessability concern for some users who have difficulty with long lists particularly those with reading disabilities

• Multi-room communities is an intended use case of spaces having an "all" home is disruptive to this use case as it undermines the mental cohesion of space such communities require by blending them together into one list.

Maybe in the future there could be some special type of space

Spaces in this first iteration should be able to act generically for multiple use cases before we discuss such things

1. Rooms in that space cannot be added to any other space.

Having shared rooms on matrix is one of it's best features. Nobody here has at any point said that this would be benificial to any use case. Even for multi-room communities having a few "common rooms" is not harmful if enough cohesion is generated through other UI features

2. Rooms in that space don't show up in Home or anywhere else outside the space.

This is literally what this issue is about; having rooms only show up in spaces they "belong" to and have home act as a "quick access" maybe it should be allowed to have rooms show up there as an option but it shouldn't be default as that causes usability problems for people in a lot of rooms

3. Space members automatically join all rooms.

This should be an opt-in feature only as it disrupts non-community use cases

Maybe that could help achieve that sense of community that those people apparently have on Discord and think they'd be missing with the current iteration of spaces.

The purpose of High SNR spaces is not to copy discord. discord is also not the only application that uses multi-room groups in this way and assuming the people who want High SNR are exclusively from discord demonstrates bias.

Maybe it would be possible to show spaces as sections in the Home screen, e.g.

1. Have a section at the top showing your favorites and notifications.

2. Right under it, have another section for your first space; showing a handful of its most recent conversations, with a "see more" button that would open the space.

3. Additional sections for the rest of your spaces.

4. At the bottom, one last section for your unsorted rooms.

This is better for the multi-room community use case but I don't think this effectively alieviates accessablity for people with reading disabilities having to parse long lists. Maybe it should still be an optional thing.

Maybe people could right click on a space and press an "add to home" button

[frandavid100]

The all room is a usability/accessability concern for some users who have difficulty with long lists particularly those with reading disabilities.

I don't see why it should be. If the room is favorites, it will stay at the top of the list no matter how long it is; and if it isn't if favorites, those people can open the spaces drawer and find the room in a space; same as they previously would have.

Anyway, here's a quick mockup I made earlier today. So you think something like this could suit your preference?

[WolvenMoonstone]

The all room is a usability/accessability concern for some users who have difficulty with long lists particularly those with reading disabilities.

I don't see why it should be. If the room is favorites, it will stay at the top of the list no matter how long it is; and if it isn't if favorites, those people can open the spaces drawer and find the room in a space; same as they previously would have.

we have already recieved feedback from people with these disabilities, spicifically @AlexiWolf in #17203 (comment), indicating that it is

Anyway, here's a quick mockup I made earlier today.

I think this is Better then the regular all room for the multi-room community use case and I also think this would be a good user paradigm for subspaces. it's definitely an option we should look into further.

However i'm still concerned about it's accessability for those with reading disabilities having dificulty parsing long lists. Maybe some user testing will be nessasary to see if that's actually the case.

I think a good option would to have an "add to home" button in the right click/ long press menu for the space so they can show up in home like that if the user wants but not otherwise. Does that sound like a good comprimise?

[williamkray]

all of these points are indicative of the fact that different people will want to use spaces for different use cases, potentially even within the same account and specific to the space itself. that variety of use cases and user interaction required for those point to there needing to be support for both methods (an "all rooms" implementation as well as the option for a "high SNR" space). There should be options to disable one or the other, or both!

[j0lol]

Preferably, I'd want something like this for the "Home" space. Excuse the crappy mockup.

Both DMs and Rooms should have a similar toggle to hide and unhide rooms added to other spaces at will. The setting should ideally persist per client.

I've also seen other applications re-use the section header as a dropdown. That could be an option as well.

Maybe something like this? Having it in the section header could be a problem

[frandavid100]

Preferably, I'd want something like this for the "Home" space.

Honestly... "home" is such a vague concept, and everyone seems to have such wildly different expectations about it, that I'd do away with it altogether.

Instead I'd have an "All" pseudospace that contains every room, and an "Orphaned" pseudospace that only shows orphaned rooms, and I'd allow the user to enable or disable them from the options.

Also, to cater to people who'd rather just have their friends and family first, I'd allow for any space to be dragged to the top and become the first thing to appear when the user opens the app.

[urbenlegend]

"Home" is a vague concept, but it has been used in other applications as a catch all as well, so it doesn't strike me, as a regular user, as all that strange. I am not convinced that having two spaces is efficient:

1. Most people just want to toggle on and off the orphan filter quickly. They don't need two separate spaces cluttering up their spaces sidebar.
2. Having to go into the application settings simply to disable or enable one or the other is unnecessary overhead and very slow in daily usage.

I do agree with allowing any space to be dragged to the top though

[jerrykan]

One alternative option that hasn't been mentioned is to have a Home screen that isn't trying to act like a space at all. I'm thinking it would be useful if the Home screen was much more like a welcome/landing page of sorts - a bit like what you get when you first log into Element, but with a bit more useful information on it.

I'm thinking this Home screen could contain things like favourite or commonly used rooms/spaces/DMs, links to Element documentation/guides, usability tips, maybe even notifications/news items from homeserver admins, etc. (I haven't fully thought out all the possible options, but hopefully you get the idea). It could also provide a way to more easily discover options/views that are less obvious to find because they are hidden behind room/spaces right-click menus. The general idea being that the Home screen could help make the on-boarding experience a bit easier and provide an overview of things. If more experienced users don't find it useful any more there could be an option to hide the Home screen from the spaces sidebar.

Then to solve the problem of having "spaces" that show various subsets of other spaces we could have a few predefined pseudo-spaces that can be added to the spaces sidebar. These pseudo-spaces would not actually be "real spaces", but dynamic views that act a bit like spaces to show things like:

• all rooms/DMs
• orphaned rooms/DMs
• only rooms/DMs with notifications
• all rooms/DMs for a specific bridge/network
• etc.
  These pseudo-spaces could cover most of the use-cases that people want out of a Home space. The pseudo-spaces could be added/removed from the spaces sidebar, and once spaces re-ordering is implemented people can move their preferred pseudo-space to the top (or not use any at all).

[ShadowJonathan]

+1 to "Home" being a "smart" screen showing often/recent rooms + DMs + suggestions and the like, much like spotify's recent revamped homescreen;

[t3chguy]

much like spotify's recent revamped homescreen;

As long as it doesn't forcefully advertise podcasts to me 🤦

[ShadowJonathan]

• These pseudo-spaces could cover most of the use-cases that people want out of a Home space. The pseudo-spaces could be added/removed from the spaces sidebar, and once spaces re-ordering is implemented people can move their preferred pseudo-space to the top (or not use any at all).

One other parallel I noticed is Telegram's Folders, for which you can set "smart" rules (Is unread && Not Archived, or Is DM && Is Contact) 👀

[ShadowJonathan]

• These pseudo-spaces could cover most of the use-cases that people want out of a Home space. The pseudo-spaces could be added/removed from the spaces sidebar, and once spaces re-ordering is implemented people can move their preferred pseudo-space to the top (or not use any at all).

By the way; Petition to call these "Quantum Spaces" :D

[urbenlegend]

Then to solve the problem of having "spaces" that show various subsets of other spaces we could have a few predefined pseudo-spaces that can be added to the spaces sidebar.

I really do NOT like the idea of adding pseudo-spaces to the sidebar. If my Discord usage pattern is any indication, I will already be joining way too many Spaces and having additional pseudo-spaces that I may or may not need at the moment just clutters it all up.

I only ever need to use "All rooms" or "Only DMs" occasionally, the rest of the time I prefer to be on "Orphaned". Having separate "All rooms" and "Only DMs" pseudo-spaces in the sidebar is just clutter. Even if I had the ability to hide or show them at will in the Application Settings, it still isn't as efficient as selecting a filter on a single, flexible "Home" space.

I definitely DON'T need a separate pseudo-space for rooms with unread notifications, because I can just sort my room list by recent activity.

While I am certainly not opposed to adding the ability to create these types of pseudo-spaces, they should not be created by default and certainly not relied on as the primary means to get "All rooms/orphaned" functionality in the Home space.

much like spotify's recent revamped homescreen;

I find that homescreen to be hopelessly confusing, especially for a messaging client. For Spotify, I can understand, because it is meant to promote discovery of new music, but for a messaging client, I think the ability to train muscle memory is important and that relies on having a consistent UI that doesn't morph based on some hidden algorithm.

[turt2live]

Just jumping in on this: I'm finding that on mobile I want "all rooms" because spaces just don't help me with my workflow there (I only ever look at the top 20 or so unread rooms, regardless of space). On web/desktop however, the "All Rooms" functionality has me not using spaces at all: I end up in the home view and never leave because all my rooms are there. The orphan-only approach had me actually using spaces, which was better for notification handling and overall mental health when dealing with my room list.

[jaywink]

I must admit I agree with the above by Travis. Initially, during the "orphan-only" approach I voiced my opinion on that it should show all rooms. I realize that may have been a mistake and also find missing the ability to see orphaned rooms, especially now that it's possible to build permanent spaces.

Not that seeing all rooms wouldn't be nice as some kind of feature as well, but it does feel the original home showing orphaned rooms only did make some sense, to support actually using the hierarchies that have been built.

[ShadowJonathan]

I'd recommend making it a toggle with defaults to travis' approach to the "Home" space, it makes sense on both platforms for the way it is, but i'd also like for users to have the option to switch.

[urbenlegend]

I agree, I also tend to use spaces in the way Travis describes. A simple, easily-accessible toggle in the Home space context menu would be much appreciated, with the default being different between mobile and desktop. Please make it persistent too. If I navigate away from the Home space it should retain the toggle setting and not automatically switch back to the default.

[HarHarLinks]

if such a thing gets implemented, I suggest (and it would probably be easy to offer) the same functionality in all spaces.

[freelock]

The lack of any "all rooms" view is the single biggest thing I don't like about both Discord and Slack -- I need a view where I can quickly find a room across spaces. The current implementation actually works very well for me for my usage (I've already created about a dozen spaces, with some nested). And I do use Ctrl-K constantly...

I can certainly understand the desire to have a space for high SNR rooms, or rooms outside a space, and so having both of these options available, with an option to turn either off seems like something that might work for everyone? I don't really care what setup is chosen by default, as long as it's easy to make it work the way I want to use it 😀

[frandavid100]

I've made another mockup, hoping to maybe reach an agreement.

My main problem with Ungrouped rooms is that it hides rooms in the side panel, where casual users are so unlikely to find stuff that even Google has retired the side panel from most of its apps.

But I would probably be OK with Ungrouped rooms if the side panel was ditched and, instead, spaces were shown in the same list as rooms. Like this:

In the Home screen, you'd see a section with your favorites and maybe your notifications. Then you'd see your ungrouped rooms, and finally you'd see a list of your level 1 spaces.

When clicking a space, you'd see a list of favorites in that space; then you'd see a list of rooms directly inside that space, and finally you'd see a list of its subspaces.f

This system would be more similar to a file browser, which even casual users are used to and, in my opinion, would make it easier for them to find their way around.

Any thoughts?

[t3chguy]

@frandavid100 how does that mockup relate to Element Web/Desktop?

[frandavid100]

@frandavid100 how does that mockup relate to Element Web/Desktop?

I guess it doesn't; but since this issue also affects Element Android (so much so that it's been mentioned several times) I thought it would be relevant to the conversation.

[urbenlegend]

@frandavid100 I find that layout for Android to be really confusing and slow.

1. I usually expect that list to just be rooms. Having spaces in there just adds a lot of noise for me when I am scrolling through my list of rooms trying to see which ones I haven't responded to yet. Spaces, to the user, are ways to group and organize rooms, not rooms themselves.
2. When I click on something in the room list, I expect to jump into a conversation. It is confusing to have some items jump into a conversation and other items show me a new list of rooms.
3. If I have a lot of Ungrouped Rooms, it forces me to have to scroll down to get to my Spaces.

I've seen other apps get around the sidebar issue by making the app header (the "Salas y Grupos") a dropdown menu. Why not have users click on that to reveal a list of Spaces. For example, we can have that menu show:

1. All rooms
2. Ungrouped
3. Space 1
4. Space 2

This way we don't use the sidebar and we don't clutter up the room list with spaces.

Personally, I would scrap "Ungrouped" all together and just have:

1. All rooms
2. Space 1
3. Space 2

mostly because I feel like "Ungrouped" should just be a filter option within the room list and as @HarHarLinks suggested, that should be available for all spaces, including sub spaces.

So just to recap.

1. On first launch, we should see an app header with "All rooms 🠯". Below that is a list of all rooms and DMs, along with a filter option at the top which you can toggle between "All" and "Ungrouped".
2. You want to navigate to a Space. You click on the "All rooms 🠯" header, revealing a dropdown menu with all spaces and nested subspaces. Maybe we can even add a Search box here to filter out spaces?
3. You select a space. Header changes to the name of the space and the room list below updates accordingly.
4. You can filter between "All" and "Ungrouped" within the context of a space to show and hide rooms that belong to nested subspaces.

[jerrykan]

Ref: #17203 (comment)

On web/desktop however, the "All Rooms" functionality has me not using spaces at all: I end up in the home view and never leave because all my rooms are there.

This has turned out to be my experience as well. I also find the "Home" view is just very cluttered now that is just a list of all rooms (I seem to have joined a lot more rooms since spaces were implemented :D).

After initially thinking "All Rooms" might be the better of the "All" or "Orphaned" options, after using it for a couple of weeks I now think it is probably the worst of the available options. I'm not convenienced that showing "Orphaned" rooms will necessarily provide a good user experience, but at this point I'm reasonably sure that "All Rooms" is not the correct answer.

[PhieF]

Right now when you join big spaces the "home" tab is just unusable, during the beta there was a step where only orphan rooms were shown so I've reversed this commit matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk@a70be45 now it's far clearer for me

[t3chguy]

@PhieF see matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk#6199

[PhieF]

Oh wonderful, thanks !

[WolvenMoonstone]

I've made another mockup, hoping to maybe reach an agreement.

My main problem with Ungrouped rooms is that it hides rooms in the side panel, where casual users are so unlikely to find stuff that even Google has retired the side panel from most of its apps.

I have had similar thoughts about this. Putting spaces behind a hidden side panel/hamburger menu makes them harder to find or understand especally for casual users

Even just having the spaces in a bar on the top or side without having to push that extra button would make this so much better. Either way i think it's a big pain point.

But I would probably be OK with Ungrouped rooms if the side panel was ditched and, instead, spaces were shown in the same list as rooms. Like this:

In the Home screen, you'd see a section with your favorites and maybe your notifications. Then you'd see your ungrouped rooms, and finally you'd see a list of your level 1 spaces.

When clicking a space, you'd see a list of favorites in that space; then you'd see a list of rooms directly inside that space, and finally you'd see a list of its subspaces.f

This system would be more similar to a file browser, which even casual users are used to and, in my opinion, would make it easier for them to find their way around.

Any thoughts?

I actually really like this mock-up and i think it makes everything much more clear. I think something like this maybe iterating on it a bit it could solve the UI on mobile and subspaces elagantly

[sumnerevans]

So, I love the new "Show all rooms in home" option, but it doesn't filter the "Favorites" list on the Home page. I have some rooms that I want to be favorites only in my "work" space, and some which I only want to be in my favorites for my "school" space, etc., so having them filtered out on the home page is essential.

[WolvenMoonstone]

It appears to me there is a correlation between people who prefer a spicific option in this thread. most of the people who want the "all" room option are using mobile but many people who like the "home" option are considering the user experience on desktop.

My guess as to why is that there's something about the UI elements on mobile that make navigation of spaces more confusing or at least less convenient for some users and possibly leading to them wanting to sidestep navigating spaces (through the use of an "all" room)

This is all speculation of course and more research is required.

[t3chguy]

Spaces, out of Beta, will let you pick between All Rooms and Home behaviours (👀 in the original key)