UX Improvements Milestone #2 - WideChat/Rocket.Chat GitHub Wiki
Livechat widget
Wireframes for Character limit
Alternatives for options as suggested by ona.
Disabled text field UI
Change deptt UI
RC PWA Chatroom
card sort study analysis
Goal: to find out frequently used functionalities that are most important to our users.
Progress: I conducted 2 card sort studies. One for the first time users asking them how they group things to make the IA more intuitive for the first-time users. And one for the frequent users asking what features they used the most.
The main idea behind conducting this study was to clear the clutter on small portions and spread out or remove the icons/ options and put it behind more number of clicks to make the more important functions upfront and easily accessible.
Conclusion: This summary gives us quite an idea of what features do people actually use and what is just acquiring unnecessary space on the screen. Inside the chatroom, Threads, discussions, and mentions were the most frequently used functionalities. And another survey concludes that people really face trouble locating the discussions or threads they are interested in. Using this result, I tried to find a way to show the most important features upfront and keep them more accessible as well as remove the unnecessary features from the main screen.
Analyzing all the collected data including the results from the card sort TCTSY survey, we reached to a conclusion that many people were facing trouble locating threads and discussions. So I've mainly tried to solve that problem.
Exploration with chat bubbles
Here's the view of the chatroom with chat bubbles. However, it Won't recommend using chat bubbles here because as the survey suggests, most of our users use RC for professional purposes. The information circulated via RC rooms will be more of like long notices or announcements. The interface with the chat bubbles definitely looks cool and better than that without them but using them in such a case may cause more clutter. Chat bubbles can be avoided here to give more breathing space to the text and it will also avoid infinite scrolls in case of long messages. This argument is backed by the fact that other chatting platforms like slack and discord don't use chat bubbles. Telegram is not a good example to compare to at this point because our user base is entirely different from that of telegram. Telegram is more inclined towards being a friendly chatting platform that RC is not ( As I've already compared our user base in the competitor analysis issue #306 ). However, I can try making a more detailed list of pros and cons of chat bubbles vs no chat bubbles if you like but for now, I'd suggest we should go with the no chat bubbles interface.
Discussions in the chatroom
As far as I understand it is a good feature because as Flora's survey results suggest, that people stop using RC because they face difficulty finding the topics that concern them. Threads are a great way to keep the discussions related to one topic in the same place but they don't provide options like replying to a particular message, react on it, or create another thread inside that thread. For example, We may consider a channel dedicated to RC GSoC discussions. GSoC has a lot of ongoing projects, and we can create separate discussions under the GSoC channel covering all the projects that are going on. It helps in keeping similar information in one place. So basically IMO, a discussion is like a subchannel under a parent channel. Much similar to the relation of the project boards and issues in Github.
Please find the detailed discussions in the issue #361: [Fastrack] propose a few obvious changes to the composer and chatroom view
Placement for the items of the three-dot menu
Link to figma
For Alternative iterations
https://www.figma.com/file/pY2aX4rYDuxiQ51cgL8Sy7/Untitled?node-id=78%3A0
For Final Wireframes
https://www.figma.com/file/B7VC8Bc9emWyAo7nasTxKd/RC-mobile-PWA-final?node-id=0%3A1
Explorations with chat bubbles
I tested this design on 3 of my friends and figured out that they expected that typing on the search will find them threads and discussions including the typed keywords too. So maybe we should show these too. Is that possible with a PWA. This level of search?
Casual mode
