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The Matrix Trashfire

blog.koehntopp.info

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Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#81

Post by thibaultamartin »

IanCal wrote: post #18

This kind of process is extremely valuable and should be done by devs more often. Start from the start and follow whatever your application tells you to do . Note down when it doesn't tell you where to go or what to do. You'd be surprised by just how many things you do automatically while working because you know the little tricks and things to get by, and that wording doesn't necessarily match what the app requires…

Hi, I'm the Thib person mention in this article, and I agree that QA is super important. I can mostly talk about matrix.org, since I have little power over the Element clients. Disclaimer though: I'm technically employed by Element (to make paperwork simpler since I'm France-based, Element has an entity in France, and the Foundation is UK-based), but I'm working for the Foundation full time.

This kind of article is super valuable since it gives us the perspective of a new user. I opened https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/2178 to translate the gripes mentioned in the issue into actionable items for us. I took action on the most urgent one (updating the Try Matrix page), but want to take the time to go beyond the surface symptoms and address the root cause of the other gripes.

On the Foundation side, we're a small but mighty team of four. The website is currently maintained part time by me and a volunteer who is doing an excellent job at it.

As I wrote recently in a blog post "Tracking what works, not people" (https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/01/24-tracking-what-works/), I would love to have the resources to conduct user research and user testing on the website but I unfortunately don't. We deployed privacy-preserving analytics to see where people drop and what confuses them. It's not nearly as good as proper QA and user testing, but that's what we can afford for now.

Overall I'm grateful to the author for documenting their frustration, and even more grateful for reacting constructively to our responses and integrating them in the blog post! One of the strengths of open source is to find and address issues collectively. I consider this blog post to be a good open source contribution.

If people around believe in our mission and want to help us with their brainpower, I invite them to join our "Office of the Matrix.org Foundation" room: https://matrix.to/#/%23foundation-office:matrix.org

For those aligned with our mission and who want to support us financially, the https://matrix.org/support/ page should give you all the information you need to help us out.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#82

Post by apetresc »

master-lincoln wrote: post #43
haltcatchfire wrote: post #16

We used Matrix for a couple of years at my company, but got kicked out from their managed hosting due to the new requirement of 50+ seats. The years we've been using it has been more of tolerating its flaws than a pleasant user experience. We migrated to Slack and was blown away of how It Just Works.

Who is "they"? Afaik the matrix organization doesn't offer hosted servers

They do indeed: https://element.io/pricing

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#83

Post by gowings97 »

thibaultamartin wrote: post #81
IanCal wrote: post #18

This kind of process is extremely valuable and should be done by devs more often. Start from the start and follow whatever your application tells you to do . Note down when it doesn't tell you where to go or what to do. You'd be surprised by just how many things you do automatically while working because you know the little tricks and things to get by, and that wording doesn't necessarily match what the app requires…

Hi, I'm the Thib person mention in this article, and I agree that QA is super important. I can mostly talk about matrix.org, since I have little power over the Element clients. Disclaimer though: I'm technically employed by Element (to make paperwork simpler since I'm France-based, Element has an entity in France, and the Foundation is UK-based), but I'm working for the Foundation full time. This kind of article is s…

Do you have any thoughts on how you might improve this workflow?

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#84

Post by raziel2p »

danpalmer wrote: post #14

I've never used Matrix, directly. However I use Beeper all day every day, via their iOS, Android, and macOS clients. Beeper (not the iMessage app, but their previous and continuing multi-network app) is pretty great. I get one consistent UX across all chat networks I use. Sometimes the networks drop out, but rarely due to Beeper issues. Beeper is essentially a Matrix homeserver, plus a bunch of hosted Matrix bridges,…

Depends on how you define "Matrix", I guess. The technology is undoubtedly great, but it also needs to sell itself as a (standalone) product if it wants to catch on.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#85

Post by oohffyvfg »

thibaultamartin wrote: post #81
IanCal wrote: post #18

This kind of process is extremely valuable and should be done by devs more often. Start from the start and follow whatever your application tells you to do . Note down when it doesn't tell you where to go or what to do. You'd be surprised by just how many things you do automatically while working because you know the little tricks and things to get by, and that wording doesn't necessarily match what the app requires…

Hi, I'm the Thib person mention in this article, and I agree that QA is super important. I can mostly talk about matrix.org, since I have little power over the Element clients. Disclaimer though: I'm technically employed by Element (to make paperwork simpler since I'm France-based, Element has an entity in France, and the Foundation is UK-based), but I'm working for the Foundation full time. This kind of article is s…

most of those complaints are talked about weekly on the element/elementweb own rooms at matrix.

also, i myself gave up contributing small fixes because you don't host source map files and I'm too lazy to setup a dev env.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#86

Post by raziel2p »

nottorp wrote: post #79
influencer3000 wrote: post #29

While it's never fun to receive negative feedback, it'll only help to improve the product. Still, I run Matrix servers since inception of the project (10 years now \o/), and for an experienced system administrator this is not something difficult to do. If you think running a Matrix server is difficult, you are probably not the intended audience: running an IRC server, an email server, or some other server, is mostly…

> Matrix is a communication protocol, and it is not intended to be touched by end-users. So what is "intended to be touched by end users"? I can't figure that out either from the article or the comments here. Assume I can (and actually have) run an irc server, but I haven't set up Matrix for the last 10 years.

The end user is meant to use 1) A client (e.g. Element), and 2) an account created on some server - with the client connecting to that server.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#87

Post by rglullis »

MattJ100 wrote: post #78
rglullis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, now go try to convince your 70 year-old father, who is using iOS, to join you and to use it as your primary means of conversation. I'm not being facetious. Try that, and then try doing it with Matrix/Element. Tell me which one do you end up with.

Did you try it? What were the pain points?

The first time I did this exercise was in 2018 (when I first set up an XMPP server and Matrix Synapse for Communick) and there simply wasn't any working iOS app. Monal was the only app I found and managed to install for him. It did chat only and would crash. I do not recall to get e2ee working and the fact that it is optional made things confusing even for me - e.g, I wasn't able to switch between a desktop client and Conversations easily.

Element (then called riot.im) managed to do text, audio and video calls. The app had some bugs, but nothing that would block me from calling each other. The UX can still be confusing and I have occasional conversations where my father complains he can not hear me, most of them caused by my father not knowing that kept the video call but switched to the internal phone speaker instead of the external one.

I heard about Siskin some months ago. Honestly, I haven't tried it yet. It might be that is fully functional, but the UI is so bare that there is no way that I'll be able to convince my father to switch to it. He still complains that he'd rather use WhatsApp like everyone else, so whatever XMPP brings now will be a case of "too little, too late".

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#88

Post by thibaultamartin »

gowings97 wrote: post #83
thibaultamartin wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I'm the Thib person mention in this article, and I agree that QA is super important. I can mostly talk about matrix.org, since I have little power over the Element clients. Disclaimer though: I'm technically employed by Element (to make paperwork simpler since I'm France-based, Element has an entity in France, and the Foundation is UK-based), but I'm working for the Foundation full time. This kind of article is s…

Do you have any thoughts on how you might improve this workflow?

For the matrix.org website, we landed https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/pull/2179 as a quick fix, but we can do better.

I think there are several things we can do improve, and the process should be fairly similar with Element:

1. Refine who the website is for, and what they are coming here for. We need to narrow down who our audiences are, what they want, what they known and don't know, and how we can best serve them.

2. Conduct user research with a diverse set of people representative of who we think our audiences are. We need to sit down with them, ask them to create a matrix account unguided, and ask them to comment what they are doing and how they feel about things.

One of the difficulties of the website is to find the right balance between not overwhelming the user with difficult decisions (picking a client? picking a server? I just want to chat with my friends!!) without being too biased. We need to be opinionated to guide newcomers through a decently simple process, but we need to leave room for all the vendors to thrive.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#89

Post by Yanael »

A friend wanted me to switch to Matrix for our 1:1 conversations and group chat of 3 people. The onboarding and user experience have been very poor on Element for years. I'm left with the feeling it is not made to replace a 1:1 messaging app. The protocol covers a broader use case, and the end-user apps are buggy and have a confusing user experience.

There is some complexity in educating due to its distributed nature, but a top notch UX is much needed to overcome it.

Re: The Matrix Trashfire

#90

Post by raziel2p »

kibwen wrote: post #36
theshrike79 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on IRC when ircII and BitchX were common clients along with huge scripts on both for "irc wars" and shit. I can deal with jank. But the Matrix UI/UX still grates me on how bad it is. Just stop pretending, copy what Discord does and be done with it.

Cinny is the Matrix client that copies Discord's UI. My friends and I use it as the default web interface for our private server, no complaints (other than the fact that it makes you appreciate Discord's sometimes-annoying "join all channels by default" feature; the opposite, classic IRC approach of forcing everyone to search for and manually join all channels scales better but is an absolute disaster for discoverabi…

This bothers me just as much in Discord as it does Slack/IRC. Has any chat software figured out this problem yet? Surely there must be some middle ground, like optional channel categories or something.
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