Part of this may be related to my lack of clarity of the difference between Rooms and Messages.

Here's what actually went down:

• We have a room for all users (say Z1)
• Somebody was making specific lunch plans for the day and messages Z1 to everybody who was interested to discuss options in a message (say Z2)
• People were unable to see Z2 (presumably because it was a message?)
• So then the person decided to try to make a room to replace Z2, but couldn't figure out how

Obviously really important stuff here :p

I agree with you though that there aren't many business cases I can conjure up where it seems like rooms would be useful. It was just the closest thing we could find where it seemed like people could openly join.

FWIW, I do think this UI is poorly designed, and it's reasonable for users to find it confusing: it teaches them how to do something, then takes that away from them.

Two ideas might be:

• If we're worried that users can't initially figure out how to create/join rooms, make the empty UI a piece of text which tells them how ("Click Search to find or create a room."), not text which teaches them the wrong way to perform the operations.
• Make "New Message/New Room" a dropdown which contains "New Room" and "New Message" options, so both options are accessible from both the Search view and the main thread view.

I'm not saying its the best design in the world, just that it was intentional. Also, this install would have tons of junk rooms if it was as easy to make as a message, and I don't think enough value would have been created to offset all that spam / giant junk listing of rooms to wade through for all users for all time. This is just this install though and maybe frequently creating new rooms / making sure new users know how to make more than one room first thing right away is important.

(Also, more generally, I'm looking for context on problems so we can create tools that transform the way you work as opposed to implement the perfect tool for the way you are working today. I like to close tasks that are more of the "build this please" variety / not actionable by engineering rather than keep them open while waiting for that context.)

I think the most salient takeaway thus far for me is the rooms vs messages threads is confusing. See T7587 for the best tracking task there, which is talking about converting one to the other potentially. (Under the hood, its just policy on the same object.)

I'll let you guys figure out what you want; I was merely remarking on my confusion.

I got my yummy lunch in the end, which is pretty much all I care about anyways.