New Overlay Review (3/25/25)

The New Overlay adds some brilliant features but also has some really bad issues.
Things I like about the new overlay is that the new customizability settings are great I like the addition because having greater agency over how discord looks makes it more appealing for all users and even better accessibly for the users that need it esspecially with the zoom and font size sliders.
My issue however is the layout itself. It's bad really bad it looks like an early 2000s solid color, text only, cheap webpage forum. The old version worked better and looked better too. The main issue with the new version is that it has a lot of dead space that's empty and being wasted it actually looks more mess as it cramps the rest of the UI elements. Cerning and line breaks just make things look B I G G E R but disorganized.
I understand that for any service that when a new feature is implemented there needs to be a space reserved for it so that it is accessible, functional, and synergizes well with the existing software. If you get a new thing you need a place to put it and it's only worthwhile if you actually have a use for it. I know as a consumer, businesses pretty much need to guess what new features and changes improve their service in the hopes to gain new audiences. They usually try to reinvent themselves to be more appealing. So businesses have to juggle the effectiveness, usability, organization, cost, and appeal each time they add a new feature and hope that it's sucessful. That's a very tough position to be in since any work that fails or is hated flops. But businesses shouldn't reinvent themselves, at least I feel they shouldn't. From what I've noticed it's a bad play, here's why: When a business rebrands their products or remodles their services. It promises that they lose some of their audience but only possibly attracts new audiences practically it's taking a loss. This happens because everyone has to now adjust to learn the new system and unleard the old system just to keep up with the service just to catch up to the same functionality. This issue happens with all Users who've used the previous system and new hires. People aren't great at adjusting on the fly like that and so feels discouraging some quitting because the process is to much of an investment to be worth reinvesting. So businesses I feel shouldn't trade audience like stocks. Businesses shouldn't reinvent. The best services don't need the biggest catalog, the best organization, or the fastest search engine. Sure these things help but what makes the best services is being intuitive so I reccomend businesses to make their services focus on familiarity not streamlining. Please I say this not only for myself but any users who agree with this. Discord works well as don't ruin that, but expand upon it.

My Suggestions for Changes to Discord
- Bring back the old overlay (2020-2025) as the default
- Keep all of the added settings features added in this update
- Make individual panels able to be resize and zoom/scale adjust so that you can expand, collapse, and zoom in to view and declutter better. This way it feels less cluttered but also better to see when needed. Also add the ability to minimize panels apply to all of them instead of just profiles in DMs. Perhaps also add it to channel select on servers.
- The ability to toggle show and hide user icons next to texts/posts. And have this feature apply to DMs and Servers/Group Chats separately because visual icons are more distinct which is more helpful when you're reading messages from multiple users.

That's all thank you for reading and hope this was helpful both to Devs and Users alike.