Every UI change seems to make things more distracting and harder to read

Jelle
  • Edited

I'm still waiting for line breaks between older and newer messages to be added back in as an opt-out feature - an example of things that became standard practice because they make chat easier to read and follow - and now another update happened, and made more changes that make things less legible, and things that shouldn't be as noticable are now highly distracting.

Even when I can't put my finger on exactly what has changed, I can always immediately tell when a Discord update with interface changes has landed because something feels entirely wrong, and I notice it taking a lot more effort just to catch up on chat in servers.

Then I start to notice specifics, like how mentions that don't actually target me are now more distracting than they ever should be. Mentions didn't need change at all - the ones that targeted me were very noticable, since the entire message gets highlighted. Mentions that don't target me had a different text color, meaning they were easy to spot. They had the right level of noticability, and now they're always drawing my eyes away from what I'm trying to read.

There are so many changes I can't imagine people were asking for, that have contributed to this. Whenever I move my mouse across my screen I get a dance of dark lines because when I hover over a message, no matter how briefly, it gets... I would say highlighted, but the background actually gets darker. It's still distracting to have something wide move across your screen when you're moving your mouse away while reading something.

Those of us who disable certain distracting features and use a minimalist interface do so because we want to have an easy time reading things and not have our eyes drawn away all the time.

If you're going to make changes like this, at least leave the compact interface alone, and foist them on people who have chosen that kind of interface. As someone who actually pays a subscription for Nitro, mainly so I can support some specific servers, it pains me extra hard to be disregarded like this.

 

:Edit: Oh, great, it gets worse. Just noticed reactions now have their own contrast background? WHY? I can't imagine that the Discord dev team have too much time on their hands and are making unneeded and unwanted changes out of boredom. Give them some PTO instead.

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Comments

3 comments

Date Votes
  • ﾌΣИI͛ꊼ
    • Edited

    I concur the issues with the GUI updates as of late; here is another good example with detail as to why I am not to pleased with some changes like you are.

    I am not sure why Discord would consider doing this but this is redundant to have two extra steps to just edit roles in the desktop version of Discord, and in my honest opinion is sorta a waste of time (No offense Discord)..

    In the past version(s) there was one step that was taken when editing roles or creating roles, it was all in a entire list view: you clicked on a role and had access to that entire Roles settings all in one spot, it allowed me to set up servers Quickly and easily:
    (Example: 1.0)
    Now you have to click two things to get to a role and then it just shows the all the roles afterwards which is a pointless new feature:

    (Example: 1.1)

    (Example: 1.2)

    Also Discord moved the @Mention permission (Circled in Red) of specific roles into the display Tab, I am sorry but that is NOT a display permission, that is a API User FUNCTION permission, this in the wrong place, this needs to be in the Permissions Tab:
    (Example 1.3)

    Not only that but this also is wasting space and cramming all the roles into tighter columns Compare the old spacing of the previous version of discord with the latest updated version revision to the Roles list - If you look at the AIRHORN SOLUTIONS role (TEST ROLE marked with Blue Arrow), the entire highlighted bar with the mouse pointer over it shows the borders are shorter in width compared to the old version which had wider Roles column.

    Discord also have left a lot of space to the right and did not properly make use of this space, the columns need to be expanded.

    And Finally the Members tab in each role (Underlined in Yellow in Example 1.2 above), this is also a redundant feature as we already have a entire Members LIST (Example 1.4 below) which allows you to modify each member's roles directly and also manage them, ban them, etc:
    (Example: 1.4)
    Instead of making an entire new GUI function for this why not just create a shortcut button instead to the Members list? I can only imagine the hours of coding it took to create an entire separate UI script for accessing the Assigned Members to Roles function when those hours could be used more efficiently elsewhere?

    I see no point to this GUI update to Discord involving roles management. The only thing that was nice about this was that the GUI example Text that shows how the text will look with lightmode vs darkmode in Discord Desktop and in the role Preview Pane shows the entire name of each role because it's wide (Example 1.5):
    (Example: 1.5)
    Instead this should have just been adjusted in the previous GUI Role List View and widened so all the text would be viewable.

    Overall to summarize my point - most of these changes to this area was redundant and also has created extra work compared to the previous interface, made legibility more difficult to work with servers, and created unneeded steps, I feel that Discord could have focused on other more important matters such as the functionality in operating systems and Mobile units.. We have compatibility issues that has yet to be resolved for over a year, I appreciate Discord team wanting to approve it's aesthetic appeal but... We have more important matters to focus on... 

    Best regards,
    Kai

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  • Jelle
    • Edited

    Thank you for adding more specific examples. I fired up Discord today planning to catch up on my messages in certain servers, as has been a daily habit for a long time, and I actually had to stop a few channels into the first server because it just felt uncomfortable to use, and it was taking too much effort to read things without my eyes being draw away from what I was trying to read.

     

    Dev team, or whoever is pushing these decision down from above, please, stop forcing these changes on users, especially ones using options to make things more readable, and ones using compact mode to minimize visual clutter. It just makes no sense to make these changes for those users. Make them optional in the classic lay-out all you want, but stop forcing these things on people who like to actually be able to read things easily.

    2
  • Dax

    The new pings/channel links are also really hard to read in dark mode now. They kept the blue links and pings in light mode, but for some reason they're just a bolded white in dark mode with some faded blue background, but all this does is make things a lot more confusing and difficult to read. The new reaction boxes are really unclear and difficult to read too.

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