Room list is hard to use on small screens

[turt2live]

For the last ~week I've been trying to shake the feeling of my room list missing rooms, and can't seem to get over the feeling. My main display for Riot is only 1080p, which means a relatively large chunk of the room list is taken up by the gradients. It'd be nice if these were a lot more subtle to give preference to showing more rooms.

This is particularly bad on my laptop (which admittedly does have a crap resolution, but there's not much I can do about that):

It feels as though my invites, favourites, and recent rooms are disabled/inaccessible. This is the default layout for the sections, with the exception of being a bit narrower to maximize timeline space.

[jryans]

The gradient feels especially strange on the invites section (since it only appears as needed when there are invites to show). Perhaps that's a separate issue from the gradients more generally, though.

[ara4n]

I have the opposite problem. in the screenshot below, the gradient is so small it's almost invisible and i found myself staring stupidly at the list wondering where all the rooms had gone:

the grad was originally 40px; then got reduced 30px on Dec 18; i've just bumped it up to 35px to see how people react in efcfaed335bc66ceb6487f766bf832f667048b40

[turt2live]

tbh it's no better or worse for me after efcfaed335bc66ceb6487f766bf832f667048b40

[ara4n]

i agree the improvement is marginal. it may need a different tween function to be punchier rather than just changing the height.

[turt2live]

This is still an issue - have generalized the title given the gradient is much different from when it was first opened.

[ara4n]

so, the changes to remove the bottom gradient improved this considerably for me.
Can you articulate how it's still jarring for you?

[turt2live]

The discussion in #riot-design mostly reminds me of just how little I can see/use of my room list on my laptop. I usually end up having to minimize all the tags except the one I want to look at in that second, which still takes up a quarter of the screen.

I also find myself clicking tag headers to expand/collapse them more often than scanning the room list for unread rooms (I intentionally have all my rooms set to 'mentions only'), making my experience feel less productive.

[ara4n]

what is the actual vertical height of the laptop? and to check: we're not talking about custom tags here?

I'm wondering how this ever worked before at this vertical height - did you just scroll through the whole list (truncated to 10 rooms per sublist) every time you wanted to check for activity?

edit: context: the reason for giving each roomsublist its own scrollbar is because otherwise things like your favourites or DMs can all-to-easily be scrolled entirely off the screen, which was driving me mad.

[turt2live]

1366x768 (making roughly 600px available to the viewport, because Chrome). This is without custom tags.

I had a similar but different problem before because of the different room list behaviour: due to all the custom tags, the room list couldn't possibly fit, forcing the list to be a giant scrollable panel. This was preferred because I could scroll down and leave the window at the couple tags I cared about at the moment. When disabling custom tags, the room list was relatively unusable for similar reasons currently on develop (headers filling the viewport).

[turt2live]

I'm not sure this makes any sense 2 years later, but #3824 is a thing where I tried to describe wanting a settings flag for that fully-scrollable panel to always be shown.

[ara4n]

AH! so on the old design, it flips into "one big scrollable list" if there's not enough room for custom headers? That explains why folks have been able to use it with so many custom tags. Presumably it still truncated the sublists to 10 rooms by default?

Would your use case be solved then by having a great-big-list mode in the roomlist then, and having to constantly scroll between favs, DMs, rooms etc?

[turt2live]

yes, yes, and yes :D

[mvgorcum]

Yes, that's basically how I currently use the room list on /app.

[michaelkaye]

I showed the design to leo last night, his only and immediate feedback was that he couldn't use it on his primary development laptop (a thinkpad x220) - more than half the vertical height in the sidebar is taken up by non-functional UI, leaving a few hundred pixels for the 8 room names that ended up being visible.

[HansJK]

When I compare how I use Riot to Discord or Slack, the main differences I find hard to get over is the focus on rooms instead of organisations/communities/servers. On Riot it's nearly impossible to keep up with all the rooms, because they all get buried under each other. They are also always moving. When using Slack and Discord, I have all the channels organised within servers and organisations. This way I can stay up to date with the ones that I care about. And because the channels are organised within their own communities, they don't all end up being in one place stacked on top of each other.