Not able to see which room is in which space during filtering

[daniellekirkwood]

Your use case

What would you like to do?

When I search for General in Filter, I have a long list (because I'm a part of several Spaces). I need to know which room belongs to which Space so I that I know where to click...

When I search for General in other parts of the product, a si

milar thing happens. For example, searching for General when Forwarding a message. I'd suggest adding Grey text after General that shows the Space name.

This is a web version of an android issue: element-hq/element-android#3943

Have you considered any alternatives?

Design to consider alternatives

Additional context

No response

[t3chguy]

This is #18750 with more cases, will close that one instead though

[kittykat]

See here for similar Android issue. Solution should be similar on all three platforms.

[lilyball]

Please make sure any such fix also applies without a filter when viewing Home with Show All Rooms checked. I reported this in #19851 but just closed that as a duplicate of this issue.

[niquewoodhouse]

Home - all rooms

When all rooms is selected I think there are a few obvious ways this could work.

1) When user selects the preference of all rooms default to separating by space

ele-web-home-group-by-space-01.mov

I think this might help users see more clearly the hierarchy of space > room but it wouldn't help people have already turned on the All rooms option (and didn't know there's now a subsequent appearing option), and it doesn't work super nicely when a room is in multiple spaces (but that could be solved).

2) Alternative 1: Use message preview

This would mean needing to disable message preview which is a feature some people may find helpful.

3) Alternative 2: Tooltip

This would make it hard to know what room is what when scanning the list, the user would have to make considerably more effort to see which space the room belongs to.

---

Forwarding a message

ele-web-fwd-msg-add-space1.mov

Adding existing rooms to space

[t3chguy]

1. When user selects the preference of all rooms default to separating by space

• This is technically feasible but difficult
• Rooms can be in many spaces so a single room may now be visible and even "active" multiple times on one screen
• Makes the sorts less useful as now your unread room may be in one of your last spaces and you won't see it off-screen

and it doesn't work super nicely when a room is in multiple spaces (but that could be solved).

What do you have in mind for this?

2. Alternative 1: Use message preview

• This is technically feasible and easy

3. Alternative 2: Tooltip

• This is technically feasible and easy

---

Forwarding a message
Adding existing rooms to space

These two are trivial

[niquewoodhouse]

Please make sure any such fix also applies without a filter when viewing Home with Show All Rooms checked. I reported this in #19851 but just closed that as a duplicate of this issue.

Hi, would you mind explaining a bit more about when and why knowing the Space name is helpful please? We've looked at some options (above) of where to put it and it would help to have a bit more empathy for you in knowing when in your flow that would be helpful/satisfactory?

Eg - I don't want to hide the message preview feature to enable it in the current design, so maybe the tooltip option works alright for you, but I'm not sure what's the most important?

Thanks for your help

[lilyball]

@niquewoodhouse

It would be helpful when I have rooms of similar names from different spaces favorited. This also applies to the "Favorites" sidebar entry if enabled.

Here's what my Favorites tab looks like right now:

Even without the nearly-duplicated names though, having just the room names without the space names is rather confusing as it requires me to remember what space each room is in, or whether the room is even in a space at all. For example, here's what my Home looks like with Show all rooms enabled:

Which rooms are in spaces? Which space is the room in? The only room that's immediately obvious is "Nix Community" and that's the one room in this list that's not actually a member of a space.

---

My first inclination is to group by space, but I do worry that this would prevent the ability to curate the presentation here (e.g. reordering the rooms), which is a big issue I have with Discord. I think perhaps Home and Favorites should both have an option to "Group by space", and if that's unchecked then it should show the space some other way. In the mockups above I do see a "message preview" thing as the subtitle, which is where I was originally thinking the space would go, but I don't actually see this as a feature in the current client so I'm confused.

[t3chguy]

which is a big issue I have with Discord.

+ 1000

[germain-gg]

@niquewoodhouse would you be able to revisit the different alternatives you suggested and propose a way forward.
I personally think that message previews are important but don't think I have useful suggestions to make in this specific scenario

[niquewoodhouse]

@niquewoodhouse would you be able to revisit the different alternatives you suggested and propose a way forward.
I personally think that message previews are important but don't think I have useful suggestions to make in this specific scenario

Hi @gsouquet I've revisited and my first thought is using the tooltip to say which space it's in is the safest of these options to at least try. It doesn't solve the underlying problem of seeing at a glance which room is in which space but it's the most straightforward to execute, with our current UI constraints.

[t3chguy]

This will no longer be an issue with Spotlight

[kittykat]

And it's fixed in the forwarding dialog:

[t3chguy]

@daniellekirkwood this issue seems to be about filtering in the room list which is going away, does spotlight fix your issue sufficiently?

[shoqvalue]

I am still having a hell of a time telling rooms apart whenever they are showing without their spaces for grouping. I know this is complicated, but I haven't had a single user yet who didn't mention it in their first week (as I did). It's definitely a common pain point. And it's been solved in one dialog somewhere, but I can't now re-find that exception now. It was something like:

RoomName — "spaceA, spaceB, others."

And that worked fine. So well, I looked for it in other dialogs, and was sad to not find it. Can't that be done in any list of rooms? If the list is long, a tooltip could be used for big space lists.