Installation/authentication experience needs work

Burnchar
  • Edited

The install/auth Discord experience is not great. Nor bug reporting.

User story:

- User downloads Discord to their Windows desktop and installs

- After apparent installation, Discord splash screen says, "Starting".... This takes quite a long time and leaves the user with the initial impression that Discord is a very slow starting application, when what it is really doing is "Updating...", not starting. "Updating.." is much more agreeable for a long wait.

- User logs in with existing creds and gets a red error message similar to, "New system. Please check your email." They check their email and click "Verify login" and see that the new IP address is authorized and then...nothing. No instructions on what to do. The error still appears in the login window (really, it should automatically log in once verification completes). Experienced computer users will likely know to re-attempt the login with the same inputs that generated an error earlier, but this is not friendly to some new users.

- User tries to submit friendly feedback to suggest improvements in this area. The Discord feedback (https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/topics) page has a "New post" button near the bottom.

- User clicks "New Post" it and sees a screen that literally says, "Sign in to Discord". They are signing into Discord, so obviously they use their Discord credentials, right? No, they are met with an email/password mismatch error. Obviously, the website author would mention in this error that their "Sign into Discord" credentials are completely different than their...Discord credentials, right? No. A relatively unhelpful note, light-grey-on-white, at the bottom of the login screen, in about size 6 font, leaves a vague clue, but this the user needs to make special effort to ignore the inaccurate page title and look into the matter.

Far from a terrible user experience, but definitely one that can use some work.

1

Comments

2 comments

Date Votes
  • DSAW

    It IS a terrible user experience. Discord login needs to be totally rewritten, using Industry Standards for account creation, protection, and recovery. Discord looks like it was written by 15 year olds.

    0
  • Burnchar

    I think Discord is written quite well, and their voice communication was the first truly reliable and clear implementation I had come across. I always had occasional (or frequent) dropped audio problems with Teamspeak, Skype, Steam Chat, Apple Facetime, but Discord works 100%. Some bits just need a little more attention.
    If you feel this is a terrible experience, try using anything from Oracle, SysAid, or to a lesser extent, Apple.

    0

Please sign in to leave a comment.