Since DC version 2, chats with non-DC contacts have a gray email avatar.
The idea behind this is to make it easier to distinguish between encrypted and unencrypted chats.
This makes sense, but in my opinion, the new avatar has some disadvantages:
The chat list is now less visually appealing, especially if users have many non-DC contacts.
Group chats are also less visually appealing.
Chats are less distinguishable because everyone uses the same avatar in the same color, which creates a certain risk of confusion. Of course, the name is still there, but users tend to look at the avatar first out of habit. If normal DC contacts all had the same avatar, users would certainly be bothered by it too.
This makes the new DC versions less suitable overall for corresponding with non-DC contacts.
I have quite a few email contacts and also use emojis as avatars. Unfortunately, this no longer works. Therefore, I’m postponing the update for now, except for testing purposes.
I’ve been thinking about alternative solutions that would be possible without the disadvantages mentioned above:
Gray background with white character or emoji. As far as I know, there are currently no gray backgrounds for automatically generated character avatars. This would make unencrypted chats stand out from encrypted ones due to the gray color. At the same time, however, they would be easier to distinguish from each other using the letter or an emoji. Unfortunately, this would make DC less colorful than before, but way better than the new envelope avatars. Apple Mail also uses gray envelope avatars if a contact doesn’t have an avatar in the system contact list.
Colorful background with white character or emoji. But with an envelope badge in the bottom left. So, exactly the same as before, except that the badge would make unencrypted chats easier to recognize.
Envelope badges behind the names. As far as I know, this was the original idea and, in my opinion, would be the best solution. Maybe a nicer email badge should be used.
A separate tab or chat folder for unencrypted chats. That would be a possibility, but in my opinion it would overload the UI too much.
Keep green checkmarks. One option would be to keep the green checkmarks for regular email accounts to mark encrypted chats.
This is possible with DC 1.X. If you place an emoji in front of a group name, it is displayed as the group avatar. This also works for contacts without DC.
Since DC 2, all of these contacts are now displayed with the same gray email avatar, which really bothers me, as I have many non-DC contacts for whom I use emoji avatars. I mean, if every DC contact had the same dreary avatar, everyone would be annoyed. Why should that be good for non-DC contacts? That’s why I wrote this proposal.
It would probably be easiest to use the green checkmark for encrypted chats. Normal email accounts aren’t the standard use case anyway and only intended for experienced users.
They can be expected to distinguish between encrypted and unencrypted chats using this checkmark. In chatmail accounts, it can, of course, be omitted. The indicator makes no sense there.
All my in-chat avatars are currently grey envelopes (this is due to an already-reported beta bug, but it could happen normally). And I had thought Raiden’s objections a bit strong, but it really is quite bad.
You spend noticably more time figuring out who everyone is and where in the interface you are. You are forever reading the ends of all messages first. If someone sends you a long message in a group chat, you don’t know who sent it until you scroll to the bottom of the message. About a sixth of the screen is taken up by big icons conveying no information. It is not clear to the user what the grey/colour distinction is meant to convey. And yes, it is a bit ugly.
I am in favour of indicators distinguishing the presence/absence of encryption, but this mono-avatar method obscures the distinctions between the people I am talking to, which for many will be more important. Accidentally saying “See you tomorrow” to your spouse and “I love you” to your boss is just… something the UI should really hinder. Saying the wrong thing to the wrong person is also a sort of security risk.
Again, I am not opposed to visually distinguishing unencrypted contacts, or even to doing it in a slightly uncomfortable way, like a glaring red superuser prompt does (I think this may be the intent). But the side effects of this mono-avatar method are problematic, and I think another method might work better. Ideas?
normally at least your spouse will have also DC and hence an avatar, and there will be no confusion, otherwise you might have in fact sent an unencrypted message to her by accident, also it is not like you don’t have the person’s display name at the top of the chat, so I don’t see a need to dramatize that too much, although I am one of the persons that were skeptical of using such generic avatars for everyone for the reason you mentioned, it in fact makes it harder to find chats in the chat-list in accounts that are just classic email profile accounts and hence 99% of contacts are email contacts, that is not the main case of DC tho, and the advantage of having a big visible icon to recognize that a chat is not encrypted outperforms the downside even for me meanwhile as someone that was skeptical of the avatar change at the beginning
I think actually this is a good idea in general, to have one tab for DC chats and another for email threads, and could further avoid accidents, while allowing then to start a chat with an unencrypted contact via (+) button which is not possible right now because only DC contacts are listed in the default contact list
What if you use the same e-mail account for encrypted and unencrypted chats? They would be split? That seems okay.
Yes, boss and grandpa, or coworker and friend, is more likely than boss and spouse.
How about just putting the unencrypted avatars in a black-and-yellow striped box? This pattern: . Or vignetting them, or adding an open padlock shackle to the top of the avatar box?
Or patterning the background behind the unencrypted contact with diagonal grey stripes, or signs, or open padlocks? Or making the default background colours distinct (even if you are colourblind)?
exactly!! that is the main reason we added the email avatars, you will have two chats for the same contact, ex. your wife, and then be able to send encrypted or unencrypted depending on if ex. she is at work reading via webmail, but then if both contacts would have the exact same letter avatar it would be really confusing and you will likely end up sending an unencrypted email by accident
Oh, that is a serious application! It did not occur to me that someone might communicate with the same contact using both encrypted and unencrypted messages, but of course if someone can send both encrypted and unencrypted from one account, that is implied. Having two different icons for that is a good idea. Having the same icon for every unencrypted contacts sems less good, but I understand better now.
I seriously reprise my suggestion to use avatars that are a hash of the encryption key. That would distinguish them all.
In addition to chatmail accounts, I use regular email accounts to communicate with non-DC users. Thus, I only have chats with non-DC users there, apart from a few archived ones from the pre-chatmail era. I’m also not sure what else a regular account would be used for in the chatmail era.
Communication with non-DC users wasn’t perfect, but it’s gotten significantly worse now. Therefore, I’ll postpone the update, except for testing purposes, until I’ve agreed on alternatives with my non-DC-contacts.
For the “New Email” icon in the email tab, an envelope icon could be used instead of the iOS standard icon for new messages, to further emphasize that no encrypted messages are being sent. When using a chatmail account, the email tab should of course not be displayed.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a good idea for DC-Android or DC-Desktop yet.
Update: After upgrading to 2.x, all of my avatars were grey for twenty-odd hours before recolourizing. Apparently this is just because my Pinephone is very slow.
The active tab is highlighted below, the heading says chat or email, and the new email icon in the email tab could be an envelope icon, not the normal iOS icon for new messages. By the way, I also forgot to remove the green checkmarks, but one could just leave them. Seriously, anyone who despite alle this, still confuses unencrypted chats with encrypted ones is beyond help.
I’ve been using DC for almost five years and have never confused unencrypted chats with encrypted ones. What can happen more easily now is accidentally sending an email to the wrong person.
For me, the main selling point of DC was the possibility to chat with people who don’t have it. Unfortunately, you couldn’t set avatars for these contacts, but at least there were character avatars and a workaround with emojis in the nickname, which were then displayed as avatars. In DC-Android it was even possible to import pictures from the system address book. These weren’t saved in the backup and thus couldn’t be transferred to other devices.
I once suggested being able to set your own avatars for non-DC contacts:
There are also a few other minor issues, but I always hoped they would be resolved at some point. Since then, the situation hasn’t improved; in fact, it’s gotten worse. Since I have quite a few non-DC contacts, it might not even make sense to continue using DC at all.
I agree with you on usability and I’d even favour profile pictures for unencrypted contacts; and while I’d want a different background or something, I think the tabs could work.
It seems to me that grey avatars are going to be in the 2.x.x release. Since this will make the user experience worse in unencypted groups, and for people with many unencrypted contacts, there will be some more complaints. And then the devs will listen and decide what to do.
We’ve both given our feedback, but I think I’ve run out of information to convey at this point, and I’m not going to hang around nagging; I have other things to do and it seems useless to counterproductive. You have every right to stop using Deltachat or fork a client (and now would be a good time, so that people updating to the next release can immediately switch if they want to). If you do, good luck!
What we can do easily is to bring back colors and add some new Core API like dc_get_initials(chat_id) which returns an envelope emoji like for unencrypted chats. Currently the UIs compute chat/contact initials, i.e. a character for putting into the avatar placeholder, on their own. But the problem with this approach is that even this simple emoji looks a bit diferently on different platforms, e.g. on my Android it is yellow (but otherwise looks the same as on my desktop). OTOH moving common logic from UIs to Core is always good.
. Or vignetting them, or adding an open padlock shackle to the top of the avatar box?
signs, or open padlocks? Or making the default background colours distinct (even if you are colourblind)?
for unencrypted chats. Currently the UIs compute chat/contact initials, i.e. a character for putting into the avatar placeholder, on their own. But the problem with this approach is that even this simple emoji looks a bit diferently on different platforms, e.g. on my Android it is yellow (but otherwise looks the same as on my desktop). OTOH moving common logic from UIs to Core is always good.