Right panel state is stored per-room rather than for the whole application

[babolivier]

Steps to reproduce

1. view a room
2. open something in the right panel
3. switch rooms
4. right panel has changed as well

Outcome

What did you expect?

Right panel stays the same between room changes. If I e.g. open my list of notifications, or change my view of the room to display a member list, I expect this layout change to persist when changing rooms. Otherwise I need to go through all of my rooms to change the layout on each of them every time I need something different.

What happened instead?

Layout changes when switching rooms. I find the current behaviour (changes are saved for a room rather than for the whole app) overly confusing, because it does not match the behaviour of the other panels (e.g. left panels don't change when changing rooms), don't seem to match the semantics of some of the right panel sections (e.g. the notifications one, which spans across multiple rooms), and I very often end up switching back to a room hours later and having to figure out why Element shows me a specific section, or the profile of a specific user, instead of my usual layout. Or why I have the member list open in one rooms and closed in another. Most often it just makes me waste time by making me manually set the right panel to the right state every time I switch rooms.

I'm logging this as a bug because while it's not a technical defect I consider it to be a UX/usability bug. With the current behaviour I'd rather not be using the right panel at all but I can't even do that without manually going through each room I'm in to close it.

Operating system

Arch Linux

Browser information

Firefox 96.0

URL for webapp

develop.element.io

Application version

Element version: aed3467-react-8ced6e6117b7-js-0a8b82570252, olm version: 3.2.8

Homeserver

element.io

Will you send logs?

No

[babolivier]

Copying my feedback over to element-hq/element-meta#94 since I've only now learned it's a thing