Navigate to the first room with notifications when clicked on space notification dot

[jaiwanth-v]

Fixes element-hq/element-web/issues/17126

Signed-off-by: Jaiwanth [email protected]

[turt2live]

Code overall looks fine

[niquewoodhouse]

Design review

This is a really interesting idea. It's a small action but could make a big difference to someone's workflow. I'd like to propose some changes to make it more consistent with behaviour from the rest of the product and make it more likely to be used.

Headline:

I'd like to change the behaviour to be just on the notification dots in the space list, for all spaces whether selected or not.

Details:

Avatars don't currently do anything like this

I think having the avatars in the space list do something different to avatars in, say, the room list, could lead to a confusing experience. The fact that something needs to be selected first might not be obvious to users. These kind of small things could lead to people feeling a bit...afraid to tap things...because they can't be confident in what they'll do, which leads to a lack of trust in a product, which in turn leads to people just leaving.

What notification dots currently do

Currently, dots take you to the notification. In the room list sublist headers, notification dots send users to the first room in the list with a notification, I think. In this proposal, in the spaces list, they'd send the user to the room with the most notifications. As above, I think it's best to be consistent with what they do, so I think the dots in the spaces panel should reflect the already existing, and used, behavior. It would still provide the value of quickly getting to, and through, your notifications.

Future of spaces panel & limitation

I think there are proposals to make the avatars multi-selectable and I'm not sure how this would interact with that. If we ship this proposal as is, it becomes something we might need to undo when that happens, or alter in some way, making it possibly more complicated to improve the spaces panel later in the beta.

By limiting this to the currently selected space, its potentially not going to be used as much as it could be, and thus not be as helpful as it could be. If I see a notifcation on any space, if I see a dot anywhere in Element, tapping it should just take me to that notification/use existing behaviour.

Thank you for this contribution, I think it's a great idea and it's those small interactions that'll help this be a useful feature - thank you.

If anything isn't clear enough or I have misunderstood, please feeel free to ask follow up questions.

[jaiwanth-v]

Thank you for the detailed review @niquewoodhouse.

I'd like to change the behaviour to be just on the notification dots in the space list, for all spaces whether selected or not

This is possible to implement but as you mentioned, multi-selection of spaces might raise some issues. But I don't really think it would be a problem. Because even if it is implemented in the future, shift-clicking on avatars would just select the space rather than navigating to it. So, it might also be easy to prevent navigation on shift-clicking bubbles. But I'm not very sure about that. @t3chguy could you please confirm this?

[t3chguy]

Yeah that seems reasonable, feel free to ignore the shift clicking future, at that time we can decide if shift clicking should just be ignored by this work

[niquewoodhouse]

Thank you for the detailed review @niquewoodhouse.

I'd like to change the behaviour to be just on the notification dots in the space list, for all spaces whether selected or not

No problem @jaiwanth-v - thank you for the contribution. I just want to re-iterate something from the review:

I think. In this proposal, in the spaces list, they'd send the user to the room with the most notifications. As above, I think it's best to be consistent with what they do, so I think the dots in the spaces panel should reflect the already existing, and used, behavior.

So they should guide users to the right notification as per the existing notification dot logic in the room list. Hope that makes sense.

[jaiwanth-v]

Yup, that makes sense, I'll modify it to navigate to the first room with notifications.

[jaiwanth-v]

@niquewoodhouse I've updated the gif, let me know what you think.

[niquewoodhouse]

@niquewoodhouse I've updated the gif, let me know what you think.

Looks good, thank you. Looking forward to testing this in the beta.

[niquewoodhouse]

Thank you for contributing to the beta.

[turt2live]

@jaiwanth-v we also need sign-off on this PR to merge it. Please leave a comment, or edit the PR description to include something like the following:

Signed-off-by: Your Name <[email protected]>

[turt2live]

apologies for the painful review cycle on this: it looks sane, just a couple minor code quality issues to take a look at.

[turt2live]

thanks!