@it33_mattermost that icon is to distinguish the count of drafts and scheduled posts. See this screenshot for example-
in the above screenshot there were only drafts, and no scheduled posts, which would be the case for most users, most of the time, so I see what you’re saying.
Hey @it33_mattermost Here’s the rationale for bringing these things together.
Scheduled messages and drafts are in nature very similar (both are actually drafts), one is scheduled and one is not, thus sitting in the same place.
The UX is also very similar, you can edit both drafts and scheduled messages before they are sent or optionally send them directly to the channel they are scheduled for, or the channel they are in.
In the future you’ll also have an option to remove a schedule from a scheduled message to convert it to a draft and vice versa, so they’ll belong in the same context / UI.
We were also planning to allow users to send a scheduled message directly from the scheduled messages page in drafts (i.e. choose a channel and schedule it). Just showing a separate menu item even if its empty felt like a waste of space to do that.
Some of our competitors also combine them, and a bunch of our customers who were looking for this feature were also coming one such competitor thus also expected a similar experience. (But that shouldn’t be the only reason to combine them, which is why I included this in the end).
It also avoid users jumping to different sidebar items and sidebar items disappearing. Imagine having 1 draft in the drafts sidebar, and then changing that to a scheduled post. Right now it can easily go to the scheduled tab and the user can stay in the same sidebar item, but if we had these two as separate items, we would be jumping the user to a separate sidebar item (scheduled) and removing the drafts sidebar item the user is on, which may also seem abrupt.
We may also combine “Sent” messages in there as well. Having a place where you can view messages you that are drafts, scheduled, and sent all in the same place without the need of having these 3 as separate sidebar items.