UI improvement ideas

[Theaninova]

I really love the app and its direction so far. However I think especially on mobile it could benefit a lot from a few small(-ish) changes.

Home View

Right now the home view is very confusing in the way it's set up.

The panels create a visual hierarchy from left to right, suggesting that each panel further the left is a child of the one before, especially if part of it is hidden.

Instead they are two separate panels of the same thing, one for DMs and one for rooms.

Intuitively I'd expect both DMs and Rooms to both appear in the left column, sorted by recent activity, with the option to pin certain chats to the top.

The (+) for adding rooms would probably also more intuitively be located next to the "Rooms" label at the top. I would not use a FAB since the there are two possible contexts, the left most panel and the Rooms panel.

I'd probably also remove the separator line before the "add new space" button, since it belongs into the space category and would also fix the issue where you have a double separator when you have joined no spaces.

Chat View

For mobile, a back button at the top is missing (though maybe a hamburger icon would be more appropriate?). Additionally, the top bar lacks an indicator that it is clickable, same goes for the side panel.

Something else that can happen as well is the indicators to where people are caught up to being cut off by device corners, it would probably be better to have them above the chat input.

Another good change imo would be to consolidate the room members and room settings into one screen, which would also make it better accessible on desktop. One way would be to add the settings at the top horizontally as icons.

Spaces View

The only thing that stuck out to me was the space settings.

All the info of the settings screen should be able to fit just inside the header.

The "add room" button would fit better right next to the "Rooms" separator, the "private" as an icon next to the title, the settings icon at the top and so on.

[Airyzz]

Thanks for taking the time to create such a detailed issue!

I agree with your points about the Spaces and Chat views. lots of good points in there

I dont think I agree with the idea of putting rooms in the same area as direct messages. My thinking for this is generally I think rooms that are not in a space are kind of less important rooms, and not generally used as frequently which is why they are kind of more hidden away there. this is a more opinionated design though really and im sure many would disagree. I think if I were to implement this change I would want it to be optional

[Theaninova]

I think the rooms thing might also depend on how you use them... I think of them more as group chats, which is why having them in the DMs feels like it makes more sense. If you want them separately, I'd probably add a new entry in the sidebar for rooms. Maybe with an option "Mix rooms and DMs".

[Airyzz]

Thats a good point about rooms being used as group chats as opposed to public chat rooms - almost feels like there should really be a distinction made between these cases

Maybe in the same way there is a /markasdm command we could have something like /markasgroupdm, with an additional option to assume all rooms without spaces are groups