How do we show active live users without cluttering the header?

[Justin_Grimm2 (Justin Grimm)]

@SkyeDragon

• There is currently a UI challenge of visitors not knowing there are people in the chat rooms unless they scroll down – potentially a long way. On my install, it’s more than a full page scroll due to all the links/categories/tags I have. This is especially true on mobile, which just doesn’t surface the chat user list at all, unless they click on the menu bar. I might recommend some kind of top-right button for when chat is active (ex from mumble). Seeing that (1) or more in there is always my main cue to me that someone wants me to hop in the chat!

I too am wondering about this. It would be SUPER helpful to have an indicator next to the live voice chat room name with how many people are currently in it. For example, Live Chat Room (3)…means 3 people are in the chat room. I feel this would boost engagement with the chat room significantly. Would also be super cool to have an icon in the header that has this same thing. Maybe an icon with a video camera that has a little number next to it. The header icon would be very helpful with mobile since the sidebar navigation is hidden away in a hamburger icon so its not ‘in your face’ like on desktop.

[Falco]

@Justin_Grimm2

It would be SUPER helpful to have an indicator next to the live voice chat room name with how many people are currently in it.

Do you mean like this?

Not a fan to be honest.

@SkyeDragon

• There is currently a UI challenge of visitors not knowing there are people in the chat rooms unless they scroll down – potentially a long way. On my install, it’s more than a full page scroll due to all the links/categories/tags I have. This is especially true on mobile, which just doesn’t surface the chat user list at all, unless they click on the menu bar. I might recommend some kind of top-right button for when chat is active (ex from mumble). Seeing that (1) or more in there is always my main cue to me that someone wants me to hop in the chat!

@Justin_Grimm2

Would also be super cool to have an icon in the header that has this same thing. Maybe an icon with a video camera that has a little number next to it. The header icon would be very helpful with mobile since the sidebar navigation is hidden away in a hamburger icon so its not ‘in your face’ like on desktop.

Interesting. What do you think @awesomerobot ?

[Jagster (Jakke Flemming)]

@Justin_Grimm2

Would also be super cool to have an icon in the header that has this same thing. Maybe an icon with a video camera that has a little number next to it.

Yes. But… where?

Sure, I could move the language selector somewhere else, because it is used only by me (and random visitors, I guess). But there is quite tight — but matter of taste what to show up there, sure.

[Justin_Grimm2 (Justin Grimm)]

Maybe there is a larger play here. Just combine regular chat and video chat into the same thing. Some rooms are text chat and some rooms are video chat. Then you would only need one message bubble.

Agreed header is tight on mobile so don’t have any good suggestions on than the one you stated. Maybe making the icons ~30% smaller

[Justin_Grimm2 (Justin Grimm)]

@Falco

Do you mean like this?

Exactly. Its not much different than an inbox icon (say email on your phone) showing how many messages. The desire to click is much greater when there is a little thing saying “someone is here right now!”. I also didn’t realize that it lists each user with their avatar like that. To give you more of a live example, because the left nav is already super long on our site, I didn’t want to use the video chat section so I just made a new link for the 1 video chat room like this:

I definitely do not want the list of people who are currently in the video chat room as that would look really weird when there is like 50+ people in it. This probably makes my request for the “active users number” make more sense. Basically bailing on the list of active users because its going to get super long and replacing it with just a number like you did.

Ultimately if would be wonderful if you combined all chat types (text, video) into just one chat section to reduce the height needed on the left nav vs have 2 separate chat sections.