Afterthoughts on Discord
A follow-up analysis
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The original article for my Discord case study can be found here.
Because my original study was time-boxed at two weeks on purpose, I did not further any of my design ideas outside of what was discussed. However, being a daily user of Discord, I continued to think about the problems presented here in more depth. I plan on adding in images to show these interactions in the future.
Invites
One thing I had considered when looking at the invite button was that some smaller servers might be finished inviting new people, whereas some larger ones might always need the visibility of this button. I thought about a button type that could potentially collapse into a small icon instead, to reduce the amount of space being taken up on the channels list.
The only issue with this was my hesitation in introducing a dynamic button, as this could clash with the existing design of the app.
Friends List
You could argue that my solution disrupts the organization of information for the server screen (general to specific, left to right). However, the constraint I designed for was to allow direct access from the “home” for the user. They are used to seeing lists of people on the right hand side, and it is the least used space on the screen when comparing relatively. This type of organization allows for the user to focus on specific parts of the screen when relevant.
Especially if notifications on the left hand side are taken out completely to be used in the right bar instead, the user could adapt quickly to the faster navigation. My goal wasn’t to take the friends list screen away, but to demonstrate another way to get there, faster. I would argue that this would be helpful for mobile users as well.
Pinning
To implement a pinning function, I thought about using the space right below the channel. Some time after my study, Discord released a feature that allowed users set channel topics. Clicking on the topic, in the case of its cutoff, triggers an overlay where you can see the entire message. To me, this felt like the perfect starting ground.
If I were to add this in to Discord today, I would take one line of space below the channel name to save for a pinned message. Every channel would be able to have one pinned at a time, and as the text scrolls the pinned message would stay fixed at the top. If it was too long, it could trigger the same type of overlay as the channel topic. In the case of the “Mark as read” banner triggering, this could simply appear below the pinned message.
As a Discord user myself, I thought this type of functionality would be extremely useful for things such as announcements. My stance is that a pin function that sticks in the chat is more true to the original idea of pinning. My entire guild would love to see this be implemented.
