The New UX Design is Harmful to the Visually Impaired and Colorblind
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Saturated dark colors against dark backgrounds are hard to read and difficult to parse
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White mentions lack visual clarity and are incredibly harmful to individuals with visual impairment
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Color redesign lacks contrast and are harmful for individuals who are colorblind and/or visually impaired
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Elements lack unity
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Saturated, mid-value colors covering large fields are harmful to end-users
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Text contrast with new colors fail the WCAG test
These are catastrophic design failures for the new UX, and directly harms both end-users due to eye-strain, and directly harms visually impaired individuals due to lack of visual clarity. It makes the app less accessible, and is not only visually displeasing, but actively ableist in nature.
UX design is a way to promote a widely-used application for all consumers. This inherently limits the customer-base by increasing visual clutter and decreasing clarity through contrast. Moreover, information is harder to parse, decreasing the end-user's ability to accurately read information within the application, and increasing eye-strain.
This is not good UX design. It is the opposite. It harms end-users. Revert the changes.
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Yea it looks horrible if not change then atleast provide option to customise ourselves
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I agree. I'm color blind, the contrast are making it slightly hard to read. But mainly the white bold texts are making my eyes blind
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Well put into words, completely agree
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As a red-green colorblind person the new mention colors are much harder on my eyes, please revert the changes.
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discord don't make nonsensical ui changes every year challenge (impossible)
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Why fix something if it was not broken anyway? The mention system was perfect, the present one is really a step backwards.
Though I do appreciate the new reaction system but the mention system needs to change.48 -
Discord, this is your chance to make a change. Please, I urge you to revert the recent changes to the UI.
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Such shit this update is
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The very first thing I thought when I got the new update was "I'd better turn on colorblind mode." Imagine my surprise when there were no color blind modes available!
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how 2 make ur app less accessible 101
Completely agree with this thread, hopefully they will revert the changes back. Really the only change I liked was how the @ON button when replying to a user was made lighter, but aside from that these changes are not only useless, but also harm users. Hopefully Discord will take notice.
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i agree with some of the proposed feedback especially the freaking mentioned colour changes... why it went from a full text box that was orange if you were pinged to just a white name indicating you were pinged is beyond me.
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red-green colorblind, and I completely agree, they suck
ive cancelled my nitro until they fix it, and if they dont ill use skype25 -
im not even colorblind and my eyes hurt more with these changes
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Same boat, I hate the new changes. Colors are bad, distracting, and downright against UX in some cases. Slack has full style support and discord is just slack with so why's it so hard to do?
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Colors are horrible, specifically the darker green and blue, they are hardly separable from each other.
Green is hard to separate from dark mode background color, as it blends with it. Older one was better.
Blue is saturated to the amount that it hurts eyes of user.
Really not sure what type of devices you check these colors on, if they even did that, but on most of the new colors look horrible, hard to see or hurts the people's eyes.
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I don't even suffer from colorblindness or visual impairment (beyond a very minor need for glasses) and this hurts my eyes. "New Blurple" is painful to look at ant the contrast between it and the bold white text is even worse. Please, don't ignore this problem.
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The new blurple is too saturated. At least let us customize our apps coloring or something if they refuse to change it.
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I am visually impaired and the highly saturated new blurple is actually painful for me to look at. I would appreciate a low contrast or colorblind mode. Especially for those of us using dark mode, the contrast of dark gray to extremely saturated purple is painful.
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Issue is actually that while new colour is more saturated, it is also perceived as "darker" in value which makes for a very bizarre feeling. Try to open any drawing editor, and paint most saturated blue on white, and on black. It will look really weird.
Though, on phone it feels less horrible, but still pretty saturated, as I keep my phone rather low in light. But on desktop the new login, landing and invite screens are utter pain to use. What few screenshots of "new blurple" coloured UI elements I have seen, the are all rather bizzare (btw, new-blurple is barely 3:1 contrast on some of dark theme background, sometimes even 2.5).
To add insult to injury is the flash of this saturated-but-dark color when you just scroll through your server list or up to DM activity and instead of barely noticeable placeholder you get a flash of this. And then it's gone just after you get to notice it at all.14 -
The "new blurple" causes enough chromatic aberration through my glasses to give me double vision on any UI element using it. This is the first time I've ever had an accessibility issue caused by my poor vision and corrective lenses.
This issue is made even worse by the change from using font color to background color on elements like mentions and channel links because the far larger volume of color causes the aberration to be much more noticeable and disruptive.
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the new "blurple" color is painful for my eyes to look at as the saturation and contrast strains my eyes
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Ditto on the chromatic aberration... That's a good way of putting it! It's especially noticeable and egregious on the new text logo. I can't focus on it at all.
Who created that new logo font to begin with, anyway? It's so weird, broad and.... fuzzy? blurry? I genuinely think it's a terrible, poorly designed typeface/font. I'm honestly just baffled by the fact that this exist and has been created by actual people who should have actual type design experience. I'm sorry for sounding so mean, but this is just super super bad.
I have a feeling that the whole redesign was done by a graphic designer rather than a UX designer.
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This post explains it perfectly. I don't know who was in charge of the redesign, or who even decided stuff needed redesigning, but it was not handled well in any way.
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The amount of discomfort I’m experiencing from the new color is so bad, that my eyes have itched and hurt everytime I use the app. For the first time in years, I’ve had to remove the app from my Home Screen. This is physically painful to look at it, and I don’t mean that figuratively. I’m not neurodivergent like some of the people giving feedback, nor have I experienced serious vision problems in the past, other than. Neon blue signs or similar I’ve never had this problem. This color gives me double vision, even looking at the submit hurtle and little question mark on the bottom of the page while typing this is uncomfortable. The fact that I’ve been a user for years and cannot even have the app on my homecsreen anymore where it’s always been because it hurts my eyes is a huge problem. I actively encourage as many of you as possible to contact discord and let your voices be heard. If they do not answer us, don’t let the flame die out, keep on them, cancel nitro, whatever it takes. @
“This change is actively hurting users” is a term often thrown around for poor UI/UX, Buggy updates, ect….but how often can you say that and have it mean that a company is actively INJURING their users due to an optional change they decided to make? It’s atrocious.Clyde losing his antennas and his personality is a tragedy. Him looking like he has controller bumpers or a just a standard Xbox controller with a smile makes me sad. It was a poor change, but tolerable. The font…looks like it belongs in a preschool picture book, and users everywhere are complaining about readability. I’m not averse to change…even though I don’t like the design elements I could unhappily tolerate them…but I can’t actively use something that physically hurts me and injures my eyes and feels uncomfortable to use.
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I'm not even color blind, nor do I have any other form of visual impairment, but these changes seriously hurt my eyes to look at. Can you at least give us the option to switch back? It literally hurts to look at these oversaturated colors. Not exaggerating. It creates pain in my eyes. Please let us customize the colors at least. And also fire whoever approved this color scheme. Thanks!
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My eyes are not thankful for the new redesign. It is harsh on the eyes.
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I've discovered a whole new world of pain. I have ADHD, Autism, and an astigmatism. I went to try and turn on colorblind mode to save myself from the pain... it's not there. All of this is baked in, all of this hurts so much. I can't look at the color without it burning into my retinas. Any place they have the blues and blurple layered with other colors, it's like looking at the visual equivalent of an entire orchestra falling down the stairs while playing.
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It's easy. Certain colors are perceived worse by the eye *physically*
Some companies care about Blue component, make researches about eye reactions, make hardware and software blue filters (I enabled it on my phone and never turned it off). Discord decided to go the other way. For some reason... In all seriousness, maybe someone who was in charge of design just never heard of all that effects. There is a chance of people adapting to that, but it would be really nice from Discord devs to react appropriately and at least give is a simple toggle switch to go back to old style we all got used to and loved. IMHO designers already made their best, and you shouldn't touch something that already works. Adding/fixing - yes. Like adding a goddamn SEPARATE button for fast choosing voice i/o devices and mic sensitivity instead of hiding those under "mute mic" button (during call on desktop app)EDIT: Just tried to turn off blue filter on my phone and see how Discord colors change. Ouch. #bringbackoldui
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For some reason the new colours (at least eye-killing blue) and logo didn't appear for me but there are still ugly white pings and reactions. So in case it appears, I either find the way to downgrade or hope that an option for old design, as people mentioned above, gets added by that time. The only new thing which looks ok is the logo. All the rest looks awful from what I've seen.
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I had to delete discord shortcut from home screen on my phone because of new color. It's way too saturated. I get distracted by it every time I unlock my phone.
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