UX Issue with Ignore Users

[rdorsch]

Steps to reproduce

I have some (real world) UX feedback for Element Android, please
ignore it, if Element Android is targeted towards expert users mainly:

I am using Element among other usecases for family
communication. Naturally the users of this group are of widely varying
IT skills (and age). After sometime, there was the observation that
Element did not reliably deliver messages and part of the group even
switched to signal, because they considered Element buggy and
unreliable (could also be the Matrix server, but that is not obvious
for even normal users). Yesterday I spend the time to dig into
it. After a while, I noticed that it were always the messages of the
same users which were not displayed for one user. Since I could not
figure out the root cause myself, I asked in the Matrix HQ channel for
help. After a few options were ruled out by the experts, @ninchuka
suggested, that some users might be on the ignore list. With further
help, I could confirm that this was the case. And with further help, I
could even restore the chat history (although this was easy on Element
Android, and refers more to Element Web).

From a UX perspective, for me

a) for inexperienced users it is ways to easy to ignore users: You
accidentally bring up the context menu for a user in the chat. And
next to the back button there is the "ignore user" option. This
assumes that button navigation is used in Android, not gesture
navigation.

b) even for normal users it is too hard to find the ignore list of a user.

Outcome

A suggestion for improvement:

a) make the ignore user entry in the context menu of a chat a
configuration option in the settings. Default off, since the
inexperienced (and even many normal) users probably never need this
feature anyways.

b) Tell to user in a room at least when there was a message of an
ignored user (could be with smaller font or grayed out). There could
also be an option in settings to disable this message. But default of
this option should be on here.

I could fix the issue for me (many thanks to @ninchuka again, without
him we probably would have had to ditch Element/Matrix, or I would
have at least had to spend much more time!). For me this works now,
since I know this pitfall for my inexperienced users now.

I thought it is worth to take the time to report this UX issue back,
since I assume it is very hard for a developer to run into this issue
himself. I assume, it is unlikely that a developer accidentally ignores
user and if it happens to him, it is easy for him to fix.

I am happy to paste this into a bug report (against Element Android?),
if someone considers this helpful.

Your phone model

Google Pixel 3a (but should not matter)

Operating system version

Android 12 (but should not matter)

Application version and app store

1.6.5 [40106052] (G-fd6a45a3)

Homeserver

matrix.org

Will you send logs?

No

Are you willing to provide a PR?

No