New UI: Presenting Community Concerns to Discord
Dear Discord team,
I decided to create this specific post to present a reasoned and detailed summary of the past few months' of community concerns. One of my major worries lately has been the overwhelming feeling that Discord's team is ignoring the community feedback, and the most recent updates have only solidified this conception.
As a base of users in general, I feel I can say that most of us love Discord's systems and how it functions. For years now, it has been the ideal platform for gamers, specific fanbases (where else do you find opera and linguistics forums), or even just as a social media. Many of us use it as the sole medium to maintain our international friendships. We recognize and appreciate the work that your team has put into making it run so smoothly for us.
But I feel the need at this point to specify the where we feel the team has made mistakes:
1) constant user-interface updates, that are making the UI worse
2) ignoring the community when it requests previous versions or a stop to the changes
3) changing UI for the sake of doing something, not because it was needed.
Examples:
1) Text highlighting: The last major update that I and many other community members complained about was the addition of text highlighting. As of a few months later, the only change that happened in response to this was the ability to change text size and message spacing. It was a wonderful idea, which I do use, but it didn't address the original concern, and to this day we still have needless highlights over each individual message line. Were our feedback posts ignored, or did the Discord team just not see them?
2) Screen-share: Most recently, three significant changes were made to the screen-share interface in personal calls: 1) the buttons are now bubbles, 2) screen-share maximization is no longer the entire screen, but instead a much smaller section of the screen, and 3) the chat is necessarily hidden unless we go through specific steps to open it again, every time we refocus Discord.
As someone who uses the screen-share almost every day with friends to watch games or shows, I find it difficult to consider these improvements and not just changes for the sake of change alone. Why make the screen smaller, and the call members larger, when the purpose of screen-sharing is to see the others' screen, not the other members?
The bubbles are a minor concern, but I found the smaller squares from the older system much more elegant and, in fact, easier to use, especially as a desktop user. Bubbles may be the default for mobile UI, but on a larger screen with the room for text, it gives the general aesthetic that there's wasted space. This update even changes the order of the buttons, which in itself seems like a whimsical decision.
3) Activity feed: The last complaint that others have voiced in the community forum is that of the 'active now' menu. As of yet, there's no option to remove it, and I've heard others present privacy concerns with such as system as well. In theory it isn't a bad idea, since Discord is primarily a gaming platform. But the execution could use improvement, because the menu where it is only wastes space and clutters the UI. The same could be said for showing nicknames above private message menus. I may not want all of my friends across different servers to see every one of my nicknames, but the listing gives us no option to remove it.
Solutions/suggestions:
The purpose of this post isn't to complain needlessly or to be negative or the sake of being negative. Along with many other members of the community, the general outcry is for improvement of Discord. Both the Discord team and your user base are together in this. The outcry isn't a personal attack, it's a representation of concerns. And on this note, here are a few solutions:
1) give an option to revert to the old UI. I understand that this may involve much more work than is immediately apparent; there's no switch that will just produce the option, to be rolled out in the next update. However, given the pace with which there have been new updates, I see no reason why this isn't possible. If you will listen to us, we'll meet you half-way and wait for it.
2) If the Discord team for some reason should decide not to revert to the older interface, then it should be possible to work within the constraints of the new one. Make the screen-share maximize to fill up the entire screen, and make the member listing small enough to overlay without interfering with what we're watching. Please square the edges again, at least on desktop. [Mobile users please present any suggestions you might have in this regard].
3) Finally, if there's an option to change text size or to switch on and off color pallets, why should the same not exist for the activity feed, text highlights, and nickname listings? Make all of this customizable. Give us the options to choose, so those who do want it can keep it, and the rest of us don't have to cry in bubble overload whenever we open Discord.
As a last note, I'd like to extend a personal thanks to the entire Discord team for their consideration of the virus situation. Updating the server capacity was a kind move, and this is the sort of action that gives your community faith in the work you do here.
Sincerely,
-a concerned user
Change is good, but change to improve, not just to change.
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I could not agree more! I use discord so much for the last few years and i can not understand how can they make it so much worse just by updating the UI! I mean it when i say this, it is 5 times worse then the old one, it look worse, it is more complicated and i cant wrap my head around the fact that now i have to hold my mouse on the conversation just to see who is muted! I love your service and the old Ui was a work of art that attracted so many people to your service. Please let us at least change back to the old ui. Thank you, i wish you all the best.
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Love seeing complaints about the ui in the api section
which has nothing to do whit the api
as well as there being a "chat" section of this forum
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Donovan: I wasn't sure where else to put it, since none of the other categories seemed to fit. If you have any suggestions, then feel free to mention it. I've switched it to the other category for now.
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Well said. Completely agree with every point.
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I agree with all of this, get rid of the bubbles, make the new message red line like it used to be, and the background in the call screen that is now for some reason a pink square, just but it all back to how it looked several updates ago because this looks horrible.
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