Breadcrumbs feature for quick navigation between chats
From IRC conversation:
[17:13:26] <eeeeeta> justJanne: oh yeah, (e) as a low-priority feature request, add a 'breadcrumbs' feature similar to what riot has, so I can easily switch between recently used chats
[17:13:34] <eeeeeta> instead of scrolling through my massive list to tab between people >_<
[17:14:00] <eeeeeta> (I mean the thing at the bottom of https://medium.com/@RiotChat/riot-web-1-1-ux-3ad8d0b792e4)
...
<justJanne> eeeeeta: one idea was having a swipe on the header bar
<justJanne> left/right to swipe between people
<eeeeeta> justJanne: ooh yeah, that would be pretty nifty :)
<justJanne> but other people wanted that to do hot chats
<eeeeeta> justJanne: make it configurable?
<justJanne> not so great UX then
<eeeeeta> left/right swipes between {items in current chat list, hot chats, recently used chats}
Basically, it'd be nice to have a way to quickly jump between chats, without having to use the sidebar at all. In particular, one easy way to accomplish this would be to add a dropdown menu to the header bar, showing recently switched to chats, where selecting an item would switch back, but there would be multiple ways of doing it.
Possible UI ways of doing this
- Dropdown menu, as mentioned above
- This could simply add like 3 items to the top of the hamburger menu with "switch to chat X", as a quick & dirty first cut.
- Alternatively, it could be an additional item on the header bar.
- Swiping on the header bar left/right to jump between chats
- Swiping on the main view left/right
There wouldn't be any need to support more than one of these methods, IMHO.
Ideally, the list of chats that this feature would navigate between should be configurable to one of the following:
Possible chat lists the user may want to use
- Recently used chats
- 'Hot chats' (i.e. chats with highlights / unread messages)
- Frequently used chats (may require more work)
- Items in the current chat list, or a user-specified chat list (?)