[nadc]

(Blog post author here).

> Because you understand rooms at a different conceptual level than me. And that by itself is a good thing. But the rest of us still needs more explanations/analogies.

Yep, you hit the nail on the head.

On the Matrix/spec side, we ensured Spaces are generically useful and flexible enough to organise rooms. However, in testing and research we found users have specific goals in mind when organising conversations, which the Element UX speaks to.

It's not dissimilar to where Direct Messages are today. Early thinking behind DMs in Matrix was that they're just rooms with few participants. In practise, there's a bunch of other semantics (e.g. room name/avatar exclusively informed by the other users profile, continual re-discovery of existing conversations when creating new ones, etc) which need to be met for them to be intuitively usable by more people.