Notes on the new UI

First of all…the rollover reaction bar is uncontrollably distracting. I like that I don’t have to find the three dots and then hunt through a menu to add a reaction, but this new bar makes it way too easy to pull up a distracting menu. (In fact, it’s nigh impossible to *not* pull it up.)

The movement of the menu popping up and the yellow of the emoji really pulls the eye away from the chat. Discord being a heavily text-based medium, this is, frankly, really annoying and detrimental to my experience as a user. I like the idea behind making it a little easier to react on desktop, but there’s got to be a better balance to be struck here.

Having the messages go dark when rolled over is also distracting – not quite at the same intensity as the rollover emoji, but still annoying enough that I wish it were gone.

(Have we always been able to add reactions via right clicking on the message? Because I was today years old when I discovered that.)

Now the big one, of course – I miss the grey lines. Part of me was simply used to them, but having different users messages blocked off from each other was nice. Seeing messages without them now feels vaguely chaotic and unsettling. I know it’s been wreaking havoc on people who prefer compact mode or smaller line spacing to begin with, or who have trouble reading. I don’t mind having extra space between “paragraphs” like the old lines added. Makes it a little easier for me too.

This really a headscratcher for me. Why take them out? They may have been one of the most harmless elements of the chat UI, and I personally think they served a noble purpose of unobtrusively dividing messages from each other without the active visual change of a message darkening when moused over.

Now…the red lines. Another headscratcher. Why did this get changed? What was wrong with the old one?

All that aside, I’m not a fan. The asymmetricality of the new marker doesn’t vibe as well as the old one. It draws attention away from the chat with both location - uncomfortably close to the right edge of the chat window *and* the messages above and below – and color. That “new” badge is a very strong white/red combo found basically nowhere else in the UI, and honestly, it’s not important enough to warrant that kind of eyecatching visual. As far as I can tell, the only other red/white combo is in the taskbar, where it needs that strength to compete with things that are outside of Discord’s color language.

The old one did what it needed to do – it signaled a break in messages, using centered text to avoid drawing the eye too far from the chat, while being low-contrast enough to not draw the eye back to it multiple times like that red and white "new" badge does.

In conclusion…why, discord devs? Why did you change these things that were so not broken? They’re not even better than the old not-broken things - in fact, they're much more distracting and make my user experience much less enjoyable and functional. If you're set on bringing these changes to Discord for good, please include an option to revert the UI back to how it used to be. peace