The chat avatars displayed in the sidebar (under the DMS) section have been increased from a modest 22px to a more robust 28px (on normal font-size setting).
Reasoning
The small images make it difficult to see any details, especially for less familiar avatars.
Screenshots
The example is unfortunately without detailed avatars on my dev environment, but you get the gist.
To keep the information density the same, I’ve chosen to not increase the general row height. A potential consequence could be that the rows come across as slightly less spacious.
We are also aware that the section title no longer aligns with the usernames, but we’re willing to accept that trade-off at the moment.
The channel icons have been kept at the same size as before, since they do not have any details that suffer from a small size and are therefor less in need of an increase in size.
This brings me to another issue that I think possibly could make things better, but is beyond a design experiment (i think).
Could we allow emoji choice as avatars for chat channels? Rather than this default chat icon? Or an icon that is more lightweight? Slack and Discord both have the hashtag as their chat icon which is much more lightweight than our filled in chat bubble icon.
Yeah that’s been on my design backlog request for a long time! Would love it too. That being said, if the default would remain the channel icon (which it would), it still needs to work for that scenario too.
I can increase the size of the channel icons, but not to the same extend. They already were smaller than avatars, so we can keep the same ratio.
