Starting today, we will begin rolling out the latest Discord app (version 20) to our Android users with a new, simplified experience that makes the app easier to navigate.
In this article we will cover:
Get to your conversations faster
Before we talk about the tabs, let’s talk about getting to the tabs. You’ll first notice that we got rid of the drawer and moved to sliding panels. This opened the door for us to implement a couple of better gestures:
- You can swipe from any area on the screen to navigate between panels. Much easier on the thumbs than reaching for the edge of the screen to open a drawer.
- You can now "peek" at a new activity without having to leave your current chat. Less time navigating and more time chatting.
Improved access to features
Next, you'll notice the new bottom tabs. We wanted to find a way to expose important features in a more mobile-native way.
- Home tab: Discord is where friends and communities come together, so we made the main Home tab front-and-center. Your servers and DMs live here.
- Friends tab: We know real estate is a precious commodity on mobile devices, and tabs allowed us to remove the Friends page from being buried in the DM list. Previously, it could take up to 5 gestures to accept a friend request (open drawer → tap the home button → tap friends → tap the old “Pending” tab → tap accept). Now with tabs and some improvements to the friends page, it will only take 3. And it can have its own notification badges so you won’t miss a new request.
- Quick Switcher and Recent Mentions: To our users who are a part of many communities, we built the Quick Switcher and Recent Mentions features to make it easier to navigate around and find messages relevant to you. When we rolled out experiments with giving these features their own space, we noticed that the use of the Quick Switcher nearly doubled! We’ll be making improvements to these experiences as well -- stay tuned!
- User Settings: Your own user settings can be accessed on the right-most tab that displays your avatar and status. Power-user of custom statuses? No problem -- you can still change them directly from the tabs view by long-pressing the User Settings tab.
While we’re excited about the power of tabs, we also wanted to keep the app uncluttered, especially while you're in a conversation. So we decided that you should only see the tabs when you need them. The tabs will slide them away when you’re viewing a channel or DM.
The Future
Finally, tabs give us the flexibility to keep investing in making Discord more useful to our users. As an example, millions of users on the desktop have used server discovery to find communities relevant to their interests. In a post-tabs world, we now have a few options to bring a better way to discover new servers to mobile without cluttering the app.
As always, we’re constantly looking for ways to improve. Let us know if you have any feedback!