Design for casual voice chat — Discord for real-time distant socializing
Hello friends, welcome to UXYZ’s second app critique for Discord: an all-in-one communication app for communities, gaming, and friends. Discord provides text, image, video and audio communication between users in a chat channel of customized servers.
Many of us are going through an unusual quarantine time, although physical togetherness is hard to replace with digital experience, luckily we do have many options for distant socializing.
Discord, a freeware VoIP application initially released in 2015, has seen a 50% growth in daily voice users in the US since the beginning of 2020. Virtual classrooms, remote working, online workout classes, and weekly game nights…People use it for various purposes during this special period when it’s hard to meet each other offline.
Why is Discord good for these use cases? What’s special about it apart from many other popular communication platforms? Continue reading and find out the answers.
Initially focus on voice chat service in the gaming industry
As a free application with no plan in charging for core features, Discord is receiving most of the money from VCs until recently. In addition to the profit Discord makes from subscription plans, game store and merchandise store, the company is also looking into future revenue plans in Gamebridge(a free tool helps developers to integrate the app in their games) and game revenue sharing. From the revenue model, it could be concluded Discord makes profit mostly from the gaming industry.
Although Discord is widely known for connecting video game players, it has other interesting use cases ranging from dance classes and book clubs, to digital conventions etc.
In short, the target user group is people who enjoy casual events and value voice interaction, including video gamers, friends and family, and online community members.
What has Discord done to adapt to these use cases?
The recommended use cases of Discord listed above have several things in common:
- Participants may not know each other, and there are organizers in the group.
- Conversations are casual, and value voice and real-time interaction.
For both organizers and participants, Discord provides a smooth experience to establish a server and join a chat.
Make it easier for people to congregate
Provide extremely minimal steps to create a server
Within a minimum of 3 clicks, an organizer will be able to create a server in Discord home page. There’s no required input during the process and provide default information on the server name and icon image.
Invitations window will automatically pop up when the server is created, providing both search for Discord friends to invite and invitation URL.
Discord provides several server templates to help keep the server tight-knit and well-organized: local communities, creators & hobbies, global communities, friends and families, and study groups.
Accessibility to servers
To join a server, a user could either be invited(added by friends/through URL) or search for a server(by tag/area/name). Public servers are open to anyone to visit.
*A question here: while public servers are highly open and welcome to new members, how to prevent spamming?
Discord provides moderation settings for servers. There are several verification levels and media content filters in server moderation settings. These settings help main a relatively high openness and help prevent spamming.
Easy and light voice chat
Voice chat is the killing feature of Discord and is why many people use Discord in the first place. A single click on any voice channel will bring you to the conversation.
Apart from technical advantages(lag-free, high voice quality), Discord provides a smooth experience in voice chat.
Concise user flow to join, leave and rejoin a voice chat
Here’s a comparison of Discord and Zoom, on the user flow of a participant joining, leaving and rejoining a voice chat. Although the target users and main features of these two products are different, these two are both popular for casual chats during this social distancing period.
From the comparison, we could see it takes fewer steps for a Discord user to join, leave and rejoin a conversation. Notably, Discord provides a shortcut for returning users who exit the app last time in a voice channel, and they will automatically join this voice channel the next time they open the app.
Leave it in the background for a long time without paying attention
When the user enters a voice channel ready for voice chat, there’s no additional window popping up. All the buttons for voice/video chat control are compact in a small area and the server page remains the same. The impact this design brings is not to make voice chat a main thread task of the user.
Discord could be opened as a web page or a desktop app, even if the user switches to another application or to another web page, the audio will remain connected.
Input modes include detecting voice activity or push to talk(hold a key while talk). For the technical aspect, Discord is doing well in voice quality and space consuming. This allows it to work well along with applications require lots of resources such as games.
However, there also exists a corresponding pain point in this smooth experience when the audio connection is imperceptible. When switching to other applications or web pages, there are no signs to notify or remind users their audio is still connected.
Real-time activity sharing invokes interaction within members
In a server page, users could view what their friends are doing at a glance. In the member list, users could view if others are playing games or listening to music.
Most connections are gaming related, such as Twitch, Blizzard, Xbox and Steam.
Users could ask to join a game, watch the same streaming, or listen to the same song by clicking on the status. This real-time activity sharing invokes interaction within members.
What else is special about Discord?
Emphasis on ACG culture
There’s a wide use or bots and emoticon. ‘Bots and apps are the lifeblood of the Discord development community.’ Bots could be developed by anyone and meant to spice up the server.
This culture is brought and promoted by the initial users of Discord. Interestingly enough, when Discord was publicly released in May 2015, the only area that they pushed Discord into was for the Reddit communities, finding that many subreddit forums were replacing IRC servers with Discord ones.
Text chat: For chat, not discussion (Discord vs. Slack)
For a Slack user, you might find Discord looks extremely familiar and easy to use. While the two products have very similar UI and interface, compared to slack, Discord is more entertainment emphasized and less professional.
For a message in Discord, users could not open a thread, follow the message or share it. This means Discord is more chat-based and it’s hard to start an asynchronized discussion. Plus, there’s no file sharing feature in Discord, which makes it harder for professional use.
Live Video: Stream within a community (Discord vs. Twitch)
Unlike Twitch whose main function is video game streaming, the streaming in Discord is more like the screen sharing feature in video communication software.
The Go Live feature is hidden in voice channels, to access the live streaming, the audience would have to either click on the streamer under the channel, or click on the user list. There’s also a limited number of users joining the live at the same time, which has recently been lifted up to 50.
Take-aways
For casual chatrooms, it’s important to provide a minimal process to establish and join one. Discord did really good at optimizing the user flow to create and join a server. While users are already in a server, Discord also makes it minimal effort taken to jump out and rejoin a voice chat.
Early users could have a great impact on the community culture. Beginning from Reddit and gamers, Discord has a strong atmosphere of ACG cultures. For example, the learnability of bots is high for beginners, but bots are still surprisingly popular. There might be a compromise in the current community culture in the process of expanding user groups.
How could Discord expand user groups? There might be two approaches to this question. Firstly, how to introduce Discord to someone who hasn’t heard about it yet? Secondly, how to introduce Discord to new users? Can we provide different modes targeting different users? A less overwhelmed onboarding, and popping up windows indicate unused features could be a good idea to encourage users to start using it.
In the following critique, we will be looking into Tiktok, a video-sharing social networking service that has been the most downloaded apps in many countries since 2018. How did it achieve this? Why do people use it besides other apps? Also, what’s your experience using it? Please let us know if you have any thoughts. : D
Thanks for reading! We will appreciate if you leave your thoughts in the comment! 🙌
