It's not even listed in search engines, especially DDG, so I then have to give them the URL which adds to the awkwardness. It was a bad move in my opinion. Sure sure, the old name had an conversational stance but it at least it had a flow. riot.im still sounds much better then element.io
Anyway, with that aside. Thank you guys for creating something that works. It needs some polishing but I had my first voice call and to my surprised it just worked for both of us.
I still get a few confused moments with the UX from my mother like where's the enter button, and why do I need to enter so many passwords but other than that it is a charm.
The technology, product and pricing with the deals they are making with multiple governments and businesses is an excellent source of revenue and is very competitive at striking those deals. However the genericness of the name will be a problem with non-technical users and will always be an issue with Element which is a problem the parent has highlighted.
The SEO on the name is terrible and doesn't come up on Google, Bing or DDG. The fustrating part? They were so close on deciding to rebrand everything and have ruined it on the name (for now).
It's not too late though. I guess they will have rename Element again in order to expand into becoming a true WhatsApp alternative mindshare-wise. Right now the name is quite frankly unappealing, but everything else is the gold standard.
I really like the philosophy behind the project and I will check it out. I would, however, recommend maybe marketing it in a different way. Let's say Slack added every single one of these features on the Element home page. My guess is they wouldn't market any of these same features on the home page because they really aren't what you use the app for (which I take it is messaging). While I agree that Element seems much better than Slack in what makes it unique there's nothing telling me that's it's easier to use than Slack. There's really even nothing telling me it's even easy to use, or fun to use, or will help me communicate better with my team.
However, there's one major way it's lacking: brevity. "Element" will never be a verb like Slack, WhatsApp, Snap, Signal, etc. Telegram has the same problem -- "Send me a Telegram" is the closest you can naturally get; "Telegram me" is too much of a mouthful. Element is even worse in this respect, since I can't think of a phrase like "Send me an Element".
Now to turn this criticism upside down: I think you can spin this downside onto an amazing upside, by making the protocol the verb. People don't say "gmail me" or "aol me". They don't say "handcent me" or "textra me" (or at least, not until iMessage came along). If your goal is to encourage an open ecosystem rather than monopolize the market, not having your flagship client take up too much of the verbiage is a good thing. So it's not "Element me, it's "Matrix me".
..which, is still subpar. Two syllables with ending in x is a mouthful. I'm kind of loathe to suggest a rebrand of the protocol, too, but.. It might be worth considering.
Total aside: The single biggest improvement you could make to Element, for me, would be to stop giving mentions special treatment in the composer. I want to be able to put my cursor in the middle of someone's name, press backspace, and delete one letter, not their entire name. Using a pill as a distinct visual style to indicate that the person I'm mentioning will see it as a mention is a good thing. Making it function differently than the plain letters would is an exercise in frustration. I've nothing against WYSIWYG composers, although I prefer plain text (since I'm used to it), but if you're going to allow text-based formatting, then the composer window needs to act as (but not necessarily look like) 100% text. Polari is the absolute gold standard here, and Discord is alright (at least, if you keep their godawful "preview as you type" beta feature, which messes up mentions the same way Riot does, turned off). I spend most of my time in the composer; it's the biggest bang-free-buck area for QoL improvements.
Don’t try to make “matrix me” a thing, that’s the exact sort of thing that makes nerd decentralisation projects on the web fail outside of needing your own personal sysadmin to replace Twitter. It sounds dumb and matrix is known as a pain in the arse to use by people that have come across it, 1999 film otherwise
We have a word, it’s message.
Even people who agreed that the old name was a problem were still telling me that they just didn't like the shift in tone, that they felt doubtful about everything. It was a very surreal experience, because I knew the old name was a problem and I knew the newer name better invoked the feeling I wanted, but all of a sudden I was seeing so much pushback from so many people that I wasn't confident any more.
The solution was to take the project to a big conference with a bunch of brand new users and ask them about it while I demoed. Across the board, pretty much everyone liked the new name better, it immediately got across what I wanted. It was a complete 180 in reactions. So after that, I stuck to my guns and in a month or two everyone in the existing community was used to it and a lot of them had come around to saying they now preferred the new name.
My take is people are familiar with 'Riot', it has a sense of nostalgia for them, and even if they don't like the name Riot, that's just what pops into their head when they think about the project. If it's something you feel confident about, then you should ignore the people complaining. Or maybe not ignore, but at least filter their complaints a bit and don't treat them like gospel.
When thinking about branding changes, there's danger in listening too closely to the existing community, because it's going to be hard for them not to have a familiarity bias towards the things they're used to.
honestly, i was aok with riot as a name being a barrier to entry, i’m fully convinced at this point that barriers to entry somewhat mitigate against eternal september and the toxicity which follows with it. take irc, while it certainly has toxicity issues, the esoteric nature kept the worst away.
so even if element, as a name, adds to keeping it low enough profile to keep it from becoming a verb–i know many will disagree (particularly the devs (sorry Arathorn))–im fine with that.
i hope we can find that magic balance where it’s a fundamental project which will bring in funding and people power, but not so fundamental that everyone’s toxic aunt and uncle uses it as a verb.
Or try something random: Gregarious, Rune, Radio Moskva, Ricochet, Lore, Franko, Mayham, Rockodial. Whatever, just not Element.
Do any of these names have excitement? WhatsApp, WeChat, Jabber, Signal? I think not ;)
Do you run UI/UX tests on these flows? Also under non-ideal conditions and potential semi-broken states? I'd love to see Element become a more stable application--it's definitely more important to convincing friends to use it than an extensive feature set.
I thought the same about XMPP 15 years ago.
I think chat protocols are much like languages, it's almost inherent that in communication between people different standards and different communities form.
Different groups of people use different messengers to (often unknowingly) express an identity.
I've giving up on the hope that there will be one universal language / protocol to unite everyone.
Everyone should migrate off matrix.org sooner rather than later. I fully expect seeing regional public Matrix homeservers popping up here and there eventually, just like regional public Jabber servers did back in the day.
Or, indeed like public e-mail providers did.
Did you do user research studies on the name, if so what was the results from those studies?
I did, alongside a few others from the team.
> Do you think it's too late to change it?
Yup :)
> Did you do user research studies on the name
Yup.
> if so what was the results from those studies?
Broadly positive.
Particular areas that may be of interest include developer documentation (making https://matrix.org/docs/spec and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc not suck), Safety engineering (subjective decentralised reputation, anti-abuse and anti-spam), Rust (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk is in the ascendant), and even possibly VR (we are on a mission to ensure Matrix is the comms protocol of the multiverse) - although Safety & Spec (and generally hacking on Element and Matrix itself) are the most important domains right now. https://element.io/careers has more details.