Mobile UI v21 still sucks

We've already told you why it's wrong and why we won't tolerate this destructive change for change's sake. Discord, you are ignoring your own users and giving us the short end of the stick. When push comes to shove, we can and will replace you.

Original feedback:

I recently installed the v21 update on my phone. It disgusted me. I reverted to v15. Here’s why, ICYMI the droves of negative feedback you got from https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/360000786192-Mobile.

First of all, the sidebars are now ruined. The older system of sidebars being pulled from the sides of the screen—and ONLY the sides of the screen—was ideal and worked fine. There is no issue with usability on large phones, if you count that anywhere on the sides of the screen works to pull the sidebars out, or if you enable the option that the Back button opens the channel list.

The v21 system is barely even functional. It moves the entire screen, which causes the phone to recalculate and redraw the chat every single frame. It's a heavy load for phones, and an even heavier load for people prone to carsickness or sensory overload (such as with autism). As an additional bonus (Or rather, the direct opposite thereof; what do you call that? Punishment?) the sidebars trigger when scrolling from anywhere, even if there isn’t enough horizontal screen space for your finger to go in order to show the sidebar. This is extremely prone to misfiring, especially when you scroll long distances up and down the chat.

Unnecessary movements of elements should be reduced for accessibility. Even if you don’t give a shit about accessibility (possibly because you’re neurotypical fully-abled scum) you should regardless remove them for performance. You can’t argue with performance improvements.

Second of all, the toolbar on the bottom is purely superfluous. The older system of having a button in the channel list to access friends and direct messages, and a setting button at the bottom of the left sidebar made sense, and provided easy access to everything you need.

The newer system provides no added convenience over the older system, and wastes precious screen real estate with inconsequential garbage that used to take the space of a single icon. This is intrusive and annoying to have to use.

Another thing is the removal of ability to mention someone by tapping their avatar. In the old version, you could be writing a message and easily name-drop someone right in the middle of writing it, like “I’m not really the best informed about this. Ask [taps one avatar] or [taps another avatar] about this [taps OP’s avatar]”.

Now you can only mention someone by tapping their name instead, which raises quite a few problems. First of all, why was this even necess—It wasn’t. It was unnecessary and you know it. Second of all, the alternative now is to tap the name, which can be comically small if the person in question has a single-letter nick like “ ! ” or “ . ”. The avatars were a uniform, tappable size, and frankly, its function should have never changed. The profile menu isn’t nearly commonly used enough to be promoted to a single tap.

Finally, the composition bar is now disastrous. The old composition bar could fit 5 full lines, and the text did not reflow at any point. Attachments were accessed from a single button. The emoji picker, while disrupting the flow of composition, provided a quick view over many emoji, making it overall an easy experience to use (if you don't count the lag encountered if there are massive amounts of animated GIF emotes on screen).

The new composition bar fits significantly less text on screen, and the text reflows as soon as text reaches multiple lines. There is a hodgepodge of buttons on either side, some of which disappear when the text reaches multiple lines. The emoji picker is much smaller, but not denser at all, which makes it much slower to use.

This is not to mention the non-specific issues, such as overall worse performance, and breaking Push-to-talk, video sharing, and calls in general.

I speak for nearly every Discord app user when I say that v21’s UI is unacceptable, and it needs to go. If v22 comes out, and it isn’t forked from v20, v15, or some older, non-broken version of the app, Discord will surely go down in history as just another messaging app that neglected its user base.

Clocks

15/06/2020 08:10

Doubling down, the UI doesn't make sense, and doesn't conform to material design imo

tl73

16/06/2020 12:42
Изменен

Given discord haven't answered a single piece of feedback in the mobile section for 5 months, I wouldn't hold your breath that they will start caring about mobile users ever again.

Thanks for checking the update though so I know I still don't need to update it from v15

Endorakai

30/07/2020 03:34

Better compatibility with the browser version (no download/in-browser) for all browsers currently in use would be the more likely approach to eliminating issues / increasing features on any platform while minimizing coding needed. Right now, on the Xbox (Xbox Edge Browser), the in-browser client fails to load the website properly. This causes the website to just spin the loading icon forever... Wished this would get fixed. UWP would the BEST way to include it on Xbox - While we are talking about compatibility and inclusion to Discord across platforms.

We've already told you why it's wrong and why we won't tolerate this destructive change for change's sake. Discord, you are ignoring your own users and giving us the short end of the stick. When push comes to shove, we can and will replace you.

Original feedback:

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