Room List "Sections" &/ Personal Groups (v1) #2947
Description
This is an external facing issue.
We may track progress internally and update this ticket at intervals.
It's to be used as directional, not project management.
Introduction
Users are often faced with a long list of rooms in the room list that is hard to navigate, this is overwhelming.
- End-Users want to shorten the list to make it easy to see what needs attention urgently
- End-Users want to group the list to suit their workflow
- Related but out of scope for this proposal:
- End-Users want to discover rooms or people of relevance
- End-Users want to know how the company is structured and organised
Note: I'm trying not to call them Sections or Groups explicitly as this ties us into a design and we need to research the problem before calling the answer (just in case)!
Goal
- Explore ways in which we can address the End-User issues related to the length of the room list in Element.
- By the end of this piece of work,
- Users will be able to easily find rooms in their room list on web
- Users will feel confident they have a personal system in place to manage their workflows
- Element will have confidence in the design across platform (if appropriate) and the user feedback that enables us to progress to stage 2 (TBD)
Scope
In scope
- Design research and feedback to gather information pertaining to user’s personal workflow with reference to the Room List
- Updates to the room list on Web client
- Users are able to customise the view of their list - it only affects their own view and does not impact others’ room lists.
- The users will have the ability to create, edit, and delete and the product will respond elegantly
Out of scope
- Deliverables pertaining to Spaces
- Including, but not limited to: Users will not be able to add this solution to the Spaces panel
- We will not be migrating Personal Spaces to this solution (at this stage, or maybe at all in the future, TBD)
- Outside of MVP deliverables
- For example: The introduction of colour or icons to the proposed solution, drag and drop functionality, archive, quick access,
- Mobile delivery: The implementation at this stage will only be undertaken on Web.
Take care...
- It's important we don't add extra features for the 'sake of it'
- It's important that we don't mismatch features and try to fix one problem with several answers
- EG: We have Spaces and Filters, do we need 'sections' too? Should we even represent them on mobile given the lack of space, how does it scale on smaller screens without losing easy access to new messages?
- Notifications: We've been making big steps forwards in Notifications over the last few months, especially with users trying to track down active conversations and unread messages. Introducing 'sections' to the room list should not jeopardise the strategy or focus on enabling people to triage and find messages easily.
- The 'Creation' flow should reuse components and be as similar to all the other creation flows as possible so that its familiar to users.
- Community vs Pro:
- Slack keeps this feature only to Pro users
- Telegram only allows users to change colours or add icons in the premium experience, in the All Chats list you can only see the group a chat is in when you're on the Premium tier
- Teams does not allow you to create your own Sections in the free version, you can only use the pre-made sections like "favourites".
What do other apps look like?
Telegram
Telegram merges what we call chat filters and sections together. The web experience has a sideways slider (this is not scalable of accessible for us). "All Chats" is a folder acts as a Space containing all your rooms and DMs together, organised by latest message.
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<-- the web experience |
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Teams
Teams has "Chats" for people and groups of people and then "Teams & Channels" for rooms and notice boards... Teams also has chat filters and 'sections' like "Mentions" that are always available to select at the top of the list. Favourites is a 'section' that's always visible, even if it's empty. Chats can be in several groups -- this causes chaos for notifications...!
There's no concept of sections on desktop... You can access your favourites and archived chats from the left panel (where we have meta-spaces) Sections on mobile could be 'communities' (we call these spaces), your archived folder, or you can add extra filters. They call them 'lists' and there are already some set up for you (these are our filters). I'm not sure mixing filters and 'sections' is a good idea, it could get really confusing, really quickly. Worth researching with UX designers!!
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Slack
Slack only allows you to play with this on a subscription, which i don't have.
[https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/360043207674-Organise-your-sidebar-with-customised-sections](https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/360043207674-Organise-your-sidebar-with-customised-sections)