Provide a way to get back to home screen easily during first session

[daniellekirkwood]

The Home screen is important to new users - how do we provide a way back to it easily? (Today, once you've started or joined a room it's hard to find it again)

@niquewoodhouse Is there something we can provide in-prod that gives easy access back to "home" for new users? We may have to consider if this impacts all users or not... One way @kittykat suggested was to have the home screen show up when a user clicks on Home meta-space. WDYT?

[t3chguy]

The Welcome screen btw is the one before sign-in/registration

https://app.element.io/#/welcome

Do you mean the Home screen https://app.element.io/#/home ?

[germain-gg]

I believe what Danielle refers to here is the page that you land on right after you have successfully logged in Element.

@niquewoodhouse & @daniellekirkwood could I direct your attention to matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk#7409 as providing a bit of guidance there will likely fix this issue.

[daniellekirkwood]

I believe what Danielle refers to here is the page that you land on right after you have successfully logged in Element.

Yes

@niquewoodhouse & @daniellekirkwood could I direct your attention to matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk#7409 as providing a bit of guidance there will likely fix this issue.

Then we'd have 2 different home buttons that have different actions? Or would the Space Home and the Home in the drop down go to the same place?

[aaronraimist]

Then we'd have 2 different home buttons that have different actions? Or would the Space Home and the Home in the drop down go to the same place?

@daniellekirkwood The 2 different Home buttons that perform different actions already exists. The one in the drop down is currently only visible on instances with a custom home page like https://chat.mozilla.org and https://webchat.kde.org though which is why you may not be aware of it.

The PR currently proposes making the drop down Home button visible to all users which does highlight that existing confusing UI. I'm completely open to using a different name and/or icon for one of them if you have suggestions.

[daniellekirkwood]

Thanks, @aaronraimist
It works for me for now - we might change the language later but I think it's better to have something...

Let's see what @niquewoodhouse adds :)

[niquewoodhouse]

The Home screen is important to new users - how do we provide a way back to it easily? (Today, once you've started or joined a room it's hard to find it again)

@niquewoodhouse Is there something we can provide in-prod that gives easy access back to "home" for new users? We may have to consider if this impacts all users or not... One way @kittykat suggested was to have the home screen show up when a user clicks on Home meta-space. WDYT?

I think (if I understand the idea) then if we shipped that idea:

• Any user (eg new user or experienced user) who taps on 'Home' icon in top left will get back to the Home Screen

My concerns are:

1 - That space icon would then act differently to every other space icon (when I click on another space, I go to the last seen room). I know some people have issues with that, but its the current experience
2 - It makes viewing a room slightly harder, because when I go to home I then will need to pick a room to visit
3 - We're assuming the Home Screen is of some value to all users and I'm not sure if that's actually true

When a new user signs up they have this:

Maybe the solution is to put something in the room list if the account is under 14 days old that shows them the content of the Home Screen.

This wouldn't potentially negatively effect experienced users or create inconsistency between spaces.

[t3chguy]

Maybe the solution is to put something in the room list if the account is under 14 days old that shows them the content of the Home Screen.

Account age isn't something we have access to, the user could have registered on a non-Element client which wouldn't record any metrics we need

[daniellekirkwood]

@t3chguy - it could be a "Welcome to Element" rather than "Welcome to Matrix". Would we be able to know how long they've had our client for?

[t3chguy]

Would we be able to know how long they've had our client for?

Only from the moment we start tracking such a metric, so all existing users would be shown such a thing too

[germain-gg]

We might not be able to know whether a user has recently registered or not, but we can definitely look at the shape of their account and see whether they are already a member of many rooms for example...
If a user logs in and is only a member of one room, we can assume that they are fairly new to the network and it would probably be a good idea to show them ways to expand their connection with more people on Matrix

[niquewoodhouse]

@gsouquet so if user has, for example, ~10 or less rooms (DMs + Spaces + Rooms), we can provide a way to see Home/onboarding tips that won't impact every user of the product. Is that accurate?

[germain-gg]

I'd say so. There's probably more data we can use that just amount of room membership

[thibaultamartin]

Related but slightly different (I'm happy to create a separate ticket if needed): it's very difficult to figure out how to get back the list of rooms in a Space. Let's consider the GNOME Space for example, and that I joined a Room within the Space

To be able to get back to the list of rooms of the Space, I need to right click on the Space avatar and click on Explore Rooms

This is something people have frequently brought as unsettling and decreasing discoverability of the rooms.

A simple workaround could be to allow the user to click on the avatar of the Space they're already in to get back to the list of rooms of the Space. In the first screenshot of this comment, clicking on the GNOME avatar would lead me to the list of rooms in the second screenshot.

[robintown]

@thibaultamartin Luckily for you, that workaround has been implemented in matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk#6442 and has product approval, so it's coming soon 😉

[turt2live]

I believe the current status of this is that it needs design attention?

[daniellekirkwood]

This issue is featured on the Delight board and is in Progress.

[niquewoodhouse]

The Home Screen currently encourages/helps people to make a chat, join a room, make a room. There will soon be another screen that does this for new users, so I think we should pause this issue until we have resolved if that's working well for people. As if it does, it might be that it replaces this Home Screen.