[no_gravity]

I think someone needs to look into the onboarding process. My experience so far:

1: Clicked on "Try Now".

2: Was greeted with a blob of text. Spotted "The easiest way to try Matrix is to use the Riot Web ...".

3: Clicked on "Riot Web" because that is a link.

4: Got transferred to a different website with a lot of buttons on it.

5: Clicked on the green "Get started button"

6: Got transferred to another page with a bunch of buttons on it

7: Clicked on "Browser"

8: A new window with a "Sign in" and a "Create Account" button opened

9: Clicked on "Create account"

10: Entered a username and password

11: Got asked to do the Google Captcha

12: Had to select 4 tiles with traffic lights and cklick next

13: Was told to select stairs.

14: Since there were no stairs, I clicked "Skip"

15: Had to select 7 tiles with fire hidrants and click next

16: Had to select 4 tiles with traffic lights and click next

17: Had to select 3 tiles with traffic lights and click next

18: Had to accept terms an conditions and click "accept"

19: Had to enter a recovery passphrase.

20: Had to confirm my recovery passphrase.

21: Was forced to click a "copy" button to copy the recovery passphrase.

22: Had to click "continue"

23: Staring at a spinner for a while.

24: Was prompted with an "OK" button. Clicked it.

25: Was prompted with a "Welcome to Riot" page with different options.

26: Clicked "Explore public rooms".

27: Clicked on the first one.

28: Had to look at a spinner for a while with "Joining room" next to it.

29: Still looking at the spinner ...

30: Spinner is still spinning ... will take the time to post this to HN.

Update:

31: Back to the Matrix window. Hurray! I'm in a channel. Typing "Hello" and enter. It seems to work.

I wonder if it would be an option to shortcut these 31 steps into just one and throw everyone who clicks "Try Now" into a "Welcome to Matrix" channel.

[Arathorn]

So, that's the current Matrix network, not the new P2P Matrix stuff. That said, I think the main takehomes are:

* We need to make it easier to jump into Riot/Web from the matrix.org home page.

* Google reCAPTCHA sucks; we know.

* The new recovery passphrase thing is an error - we know, we're in the middle of fixing it, targeting next week.

* Joining rooms is slow - we know, this is harder to fix, but is on the menu.

Thanks for spelling it out ;)

[no_gravity]

Ok, great. Here comes more feedback :)

Since I did not save my password when signing up, I proceeded to set an email. Got a confirmation email and clicked the link in it.

Then signed out and clicked the "Set a new password" link.

But it does not work. I always get the message "Failed to send email: This email address was not found".

[Arathorn]

I've filed that for you at https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/13897. Please keep the feedback coming there; we are currently chasing down first time user experience snafus like this on the current app.

[tbran]

I also recently signed up, and totally agree that it was a little bit of a PITA.

I will say, however, that a lot of the difficulty appears to be tied to the privacy aspects. I think it's the only service I checked out that didn't require an email or phone number to sign up. I think the privacy/ease of signup trade-off is okay right now, and I also think that Riot is trying to make it better.

Also, I'm successfully using it with non-tech-oriented family and it's been quite good!

[MayeulC]

I'm not sure whether you are talking about the regular Matrix network on purpose, or not.

Regarding the p2p app (https://p2p.riot.im), yeah, that's a proof-of-concept they bolted onto an existing client. They could have adjusted the login page.

I need to click "Create an account" for it to work, give or take one page refresh. Then I can open the room directory and pick a room.

However, I tend to like some of that hand-holding. Plus, when someone joins a chat system, they're generally introduced to it by acquaintances that already use it, so the next onboardings are easier. Not saying it shouldn't be improved, of course.

[thrwaway69]

Add that to the pain of riot x and riot normal app on Android. Verification doesn't work at all. I tried encrypted channel with bunch of friends before and I think it's a pretty bad experience. The app forgets that you verified from time to time.