[ SD Client ] Journo badges Nina/Allie Convo notes

[ninavizz]

Per a fun conversation with Allie, I'm leaving some notes here regarding concerns, questions, interests, etc. No meaning of life insights, though, sorry.

Color Failed Decryption Badge

• Mockup above shows a reply from a journalist user whose account has been deleted, AND the message cannot be decrypted.
• Currently there are no em-dashes in the styling; both Nina and Allie agree it looks to more clearly be a system message, this way.
• When there's a gray, a purple, a blue, and an urgent-coral badge, the colors clearly have some meaning behind them—and it's not clear why a badge may be gray. Allie flagged this, and I agree that it is subsequently preferred to keep the badge colored per whatever the coloring schema is.
  • Currently: Signed-in user = Purple, Failed-To-send = Urgent Coral and all other journalists will be SD Blue.
  • It is desired for the Journalist users to each get their own color in a future iteration
    • When this change ships, it will become that much more confusing why a badge is gray.
  • The only reason the failed-to-send badge is as it is, is because there is an urgent action a journalist user needs to take, to resolve it; or else a desired outreach to a source, fails.

Send Failure Rethought

• There are now two reasons why a send might fail: there is a network error, or a missing key. It would be nice to add contextual info about the failure, in the bubble.
• The existing text to support the Bang icon, will interfere with the UI scaling once that is ready to implement.
  • Nina and Allie both find the existing implementation fussy, anyway.
• Making the bang bigger and incorporating contextual FYI text into the bubble, would be nice.

Offline Mode Badges

• When a user goes offline, there will be no more need to show the authenticated-user's badge as purple.
• For now, Nina floated it as an idea to make all offline-mode Journalist badges italicized and paler; in addition to also making all journalist badges the same color.
• For the existing PR, it's easiest for all the badges to just turn SD Blue when they go offline, but this could be the opportunity for a gray badge... or, SD Blue gets reserved for offline-mode badges, with other colors available for Journalist Badge colors.

[sssoleileraaa]

Thanks @ninavizz for documenting this so well. I'm still trying to squeeze in more discussion about possibly removing the red badges along with the gray badges, see freedomofpress/securedrop-client#1154, but don't be alarmed! I'm only looking to discuss this more as we did during our productive phone call. I think what you have mocked up here is a big improvement and I look forward to more future discussions about it. Right now, with seen/unseen, template consolidation, xenial, and improved deletion, it's looking more and more like there will be plenty of time for discussion before we even think about implementing this (I know I was more optimistic during our call 🙄)