I find the action bar a little bit too invasive. Maybe I would get rid of 2 of the 3 most used reactions… :
Since the window is tiny, when reading you’re often hovering a message. If it never overlaps a message, I wonder if it could be improved.
It covers the replied message excerpt:
I’m used to Discord in which we can click the full “quoted” message itself to go to it:
Here on the Discourse chat, you can only click the small arrow part, which I find not very intuitive (but again, I’m used to Discord…):
When you upload an image and set the chat in fullscreen, the thumbnail remains tiny. It would be nice if the thumbnail was larger when on fullscreen.
Small chat window:
Fullscreen chat window:
Another thing: it also hides a bit of the top of the message text (if the message doesn’t reply to another one) when you hover the whole message:
And for some reason, on slow connections (I suppose: I have a very slow connection nowadays), there is a delay to show the reaction bar. I don’t know why since there is apparently no server-side query. I didn’t find a delay in the CSS as well. It seems a bit sluggish:
Just to explain, I often keep the cursor on a paragraph I’m reading on the Internet (like people that put their finger on the text of a book they’re reading), hence the fact that the text is partially hidden bothers me a little. It’s not unreadable at all obviously, just a tiny thing that scratches my brain.
Maybe reduce the size a bit, because the reaction bar seems very long to me.
Here’s with a scale of 1 (default):
And a scale of 0.85:
A scale of 0.9 would also work… And here’s without the quick reactions, since most-used reactions are already available in the reaction emoji menu:
Default reaction emoji menu:
Maybe move the reactions to the "more" menu (but I'm not fond of it)
On top of other actions like when we right-click on a message on Discord? But I don’t think it’s particularly convenient if we remove the quick reactions.
But there are also mobile interactions to take into account…
I think some minor adjustments to size and positioning would help a fair bit.
We can make it a bit smaller and shift it up a bit to make sure it never occludes any text in the message and leaves a little breathing room in between.
:
