Element-web: Add option for room lists with a stable ordering (perhaps alphabetical)

[jrmuizel]

Currently it seems like the order that rooms are listed is based on recent activity. This means that the order is constantly changing which means you have to search through the list each time to find the room that you want.

Slack orders the rooms alphabetically which means that the order doesn't change so you always know roughly where to look for a particular room.

[aaronraimist]

I'm going to close this as a duplicate of #4343, feel free to thumbs up that issue

[jryans]

I think I'd actually like to keep this open, as https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/4343 has a larger scope, and we might not do all of it at the same time.

[TestardR]

We could work on these settings to allow for alphabetical ordering. Then, we would have 3 ordering possibilities: 1. Most recent, 2. Most important, 3, Alphabetical.

By default, we could order alphabetically as it seems to be a more common standard or I would say a more common sense approach. No ?

[t3chguy]

it might make more sense to users choose:

Sort my rooms by
[x] Alphabetically (default)
[ ] Activity

... and separately have a toggle for:

Stick my notifications up top [ON/OFF]

[turt2live]

That sort of option set doesn't describe how the algorithms work, at all. The importance algorithm uses activity as a tie break, not a feature. We already had a "Stick my notification up top"-like option before, and it was incredibly confusing for people.

I'm still not convinced that making the list alphabetical will fix the problem - there's a number of known bugs with the importance algorithm which happen just prior to most people suggesting that it should be alphabetical.

[nadonomy]

We had some internal discussion on this. In the immediate term we'll update the Room list section of Settings to be as follows:

Room list

Order rooms by message activity instead of by name [Toggle OFF/ON]
Show rooms with unread notifications first [Toggle OFF/ON]
Show shortcuts to recently viewed rooms [Toggle OFF/ON]

Favourites should continue to be organised manually, and for now these settings will apply to all sections.

The first 2 toggles should be enabled by default (recreating todays functionality, although allowing users to opt out of activity sorting, and in to alphabetical sorting). The last toggle I believe we already use some heuristic (joined n rooms) to enable it when actually useful in the new user journey.

@t3chguy do we need to take any special care to not override users existing settings they've already configured? If any of this untangles during development feel free to shout!

[mjattiot]

Show shortcuts to recently viewed rooms [Toggle OFF/ON]

Speaking of which ! I think the above feature (i.e. breadcrumbs / recently viewed) should be shown as a room's sublist and not a breadcrumb. Why ? Because most of our rooms don't have any logo: people don't have the time to set them up. Therefore it leads to a breadcrumb full of colored bubbles that are not self explaining: we need to hover the mouse on a bubble to see the name of the room in a tooltip:

We think, a room section called "Recently Viewed" showing a maximum of ~5 rooms would be much more efficient. What do you guys think ?

[nadonomy]

Show shortcuts to recently viewed rooms [Toggle OFF/ON]

Speaking of which ! I think the above feature (i.e. breadcrumbs / recently viewed) should be shown as a room's sublist and not a breadcrumb. Why ? Because most of our rooms don't have any logo: people don't have the time to set them up. Therefore it leads to a breadcrumb full of colored bubbles that are not self explaining: we need to hover the mouse on a bubble to see the name of the room in a tooltip:

We think, a room section called "Recently Viewed" showing a maximum of ~5 rooms would be much more efficient. What do you guys think ?

This is interesting, but I'm not sure the trade off in space (less room to display other rooms) and number of rooms exposed (less rooms to navigate to) is aligned with users goals.

The breadcrumbs themselves speak to the failure of navigating rooms in general in Riot— we have immediate updates (like this issue) to help address sort ordering, medium term work planned to re-address the semantics of the room list entirely (moving away from unergonomic scrolling letterboxes) and long term plans to re-work communities to make the both the left most panel and room list sections 100x more useful.

From there, the requirement for a separate feature to expose a list of recently viewed rooms (as breadcrumbs, or in a section, or whatever) should be way less prevalent, and we could look at ways to iterate on it then trading off all of the above, where it may even make more sense to replace it with a back/forward interaction like a browser.

[mjattiot]

@nadonomy I clearly understand that my need shall be less prevalent considering you have mid and long term ideas to rework the whole navigation. However could you be more specific on what you have planned for the mid-term ? I don't understand "re-address the semantics of the room list entirely". What do you mean ? Is there a draft of this work ? Maybe we can help, contribute to it.