Historically, Riot's UI hasn't been as smooth as Slack's - for many years we didn't have any professional UX/UI designers contributing to the project, and we built up a lot design debt along the way.
Over the last year or so we've been progressively working through fixing it, and as of Monday we now have three(!) professional designers working full time on the problem. Having turned on E2EE by default, our next big project and single biggest priority is First Time User Experience - making sure that the app is at least as smooth as Slack and Discord, particularly on first impressions. https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing... has more details - and the sections before it show some of the UI/UX work which has been landing in the last few months.
Over the last year or so we've been progressively working through fixing it, and as of Monday we now have three(!) professional designers working full time on the problem. Having turned on E2EE by default, our next big project and single biggest priority is First Time User Experience - making sure that the app is at least as smooth as Slack and Discord, particularly on first impressions. https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing... has more details - and the sections before it show some of the UI/UX work which has been landing in the last few months.