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I’ve analyzed the interfaces of Discord and all other chat/community apps as part of research for the UI/UX work we do for clients [1] and from my perspective,

by krm01 6y ago

I’ve analyzed the interfaces of Discord and all other chat/community apps as part of research for the UI/UX work we do for clients [1] and from my perspective, the Interface seems to be a big part of the winning factor. It may be just one of the many reasons why Discord does so well, but it’s often overlooked. Discord stayed miles away from looking or feeling like enterprise software. Their playful approach makes it fun to be there. Features are often brought forward as the reason why apps succeed or fail. But humans are emotional beings and how a product looks or feels contributes a lot to the company’s success (or failure). [1] http://fairpixels.pro http://fairpixels.pro

anchpop 6y ago
Discord has so many features that make it feel like it was made by and for gamers. Like the "currently playing" statuses, or "streamer mode" that hides identifying info when you have OBS open. It also works better than anything else for large communities with its roles/notifications system. It has a good design but I don't see it as particularly playful, just really well executed
- gverrilla 6y ago
  There are random joke-lines when you open the program. Also the logo is funny. That's about it for fun, but I think the joke-lines are there just to deviate attention from the fact that discord updates every 2 or 3 days which is annooying.
panorama 6y ago
Yeah, Discord still impresses me with how clean the interface _feels_ to put it simply. I remember only being on the Discord web client for a long time and remarking how much I enjoyed the interactions despite not being a native app. Then I loaded up the console and was pleasantly surprised to see it was all built in React. I suddenly felt very insecure about my own skill with React :p
ma2rten 6y ago
Can you be more specific? It seems to that Discord is very similar to slack.
- zelphirkalt 6y ago
  Not at all. Slack is noticably sluggish and has notable delay whenever I click a channel. In Discord those things are instant for me. Slack has a silly Markdown parser, while in Discord is simply works. The list goes on.
brundolf 6y ago
The playfulness is endearing, but there's something about the way the UI is structured that always feels a bit disorienting to me, even after having used it for years now. It's generally easy to find what you're looking for, but you're always "figuring it out"; it's hard to pin things down as having a concrete, spatial location. You never quite have a stable notion of "where you are". I don't know how else to describe it. It's worth noting that I don't feel this way about Slack (mostly). It has a clear visual hierarchy of Servers > Channels/DMs > Messages [> Threads]. Discord has things linked every-which-way; someone will start a group call and it's somehow separate from the shared server you're on, living in a whole separate subtree of the interface. Maybe the difference is that Discord accounts are cross-server? So you have conversations that live in a server, and conversations that live outside of any particular server?
- wodenokoto 6y ago
  Calling workspaces for servers is actually a bit of an “aha”-moment for me. I’ve found slack super confusing and counter-intuitive in how Cumbersome it is to log in to my workspaces on, for example, my phone. This is because I don’t have a slack account but multiple accounts - one for each workspace and all of them connected to the same email (so for me as a user they’re the same account. come on - Why do I have to sign up every time?) The UI around this has improved tremendously over the last 6 months, but it is still not great.
  - zacharycohn 6y ago
    Oh man, I HATE that discord ties everything to the same email. I have personal discords, work discords, side project-based discords, and community discords. I want different handles for them, I want DMs to be grouped by discord - not into a single giant bucket, I want notification emails to go to different emails. The biggest blocker to me enjoying discord is that it assumes I'm the same person across all the groups.
    - hombre_fatal 6y ago
      While a perfectly good point, it's also why it caught on. You log in once. Now you just click "Join" on servers you want. Like how Reddit spares you from registering for 100 forums.
matsemann 6y ago
> Their playful approach makes it fun to be there When lockdown started the huge company I am contracting for decided to try Discord. It was a hilarious clash between corporate culture and gaming culture for a month. I think they've toned down some of it now? (We ended up with teams) https://i.imgur.com/eVwStvT.png https://i.imgur.com/eVwStvT.png
- judge2020 6y ago
  Yes, but it's still not business-oriented. Slack still is better from an admin standpoint. https://blog.discord.com/your-place-to-talk-a7ffa19b901b https://blog.discord.com/your-place-to-talk-a7ffa19b901b https://discord.com https://discord.com
  - pavel_lishin 6y ago
    Yup - Slack is geared for teams, and Discord is geared for groups. Discord has much better moderation tools - permissions, roles, etc; Discord makes it easy to run a server strangers can join. Slack has virtually no moderation tools at all, and even at the paid tiers, it's weak. Slack is a very poor choice for anything but a tight-knit top-down administrated group, where moderation can happen outside the app itself.
- mturmon 6y ago
  Screenshot was perfect, thanks.
- rkangel 6y ago
  I seriously considered trying to move my software team onto Discord (the majority use it anyway in their personal life). The concept of always on voice channels that you can pop in and out of and see who is in is great. I'm actually a fan of Teams (which is what we're using), but that lowering of the barrier of a team member popping in to ask a question or join a chat would have been great.
- moksly 6y ago
  I think a lot of enterprise is going to end up on Teams simply because it’s part of your Office365 package. It’s kind of hard to justify paying for something that you already have, and it integrating so well with the rest of the 365 package makes it a lot easier to roll out in a non-tech savvy enterprise. Being the public sector, we’ve gone through a lot of different things, even a few specifically build for business-to-client video chats with encryption, and I can’t recall anything that has been as easy to implement as teams. We have a lot of people, like a thousand employees, who never learned how to use Skype for Business, most of them now use teams seamlessly. The fact that Microsoft are building things into it at a fairly rapid pace, and even by suggestion from users like us (the ability to hide team emails from outlook). Makes it fairly valuable. I mean, I’m in development and not operations, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a presentation platform that could be used by the political layer with so little support before those team meetings where you present to a muted audience. I personally prefer discords IRC-like bits, and use discord at home like everyone else, but it’s getting really hard to compete with teams in an enterprise setting.
formerly_proven 6y ago
A big difference between Discord and almost everything else is that server admins aren't real admins and see no more account data than everyone else on the server. This means people can freely join "hostile" servers and servers with untrusted admins, which is important for gaming, considering the toxicity of many communities.
- josteink 6y ago
  > A big difference between Discord and almost everything else is that server admins aren't real admins That’s because discord “servers” aren’t real servers and it’s all a whole big closed-source SaaS. “Server” is a clearly an intentionally misleading term and dark UX used to lure people into thinking they are have actual ownership and control of their fealty SaaS workspaces. Sadly, given the success of Discord, it seems this lie has paid off big-time though.
  - mrkcsc 6y ago
    We called them servers because our early adopters were coming from Ventrillo and Teamspeak (eg: Vent server, Teamspeak server, etc) and we wanted to use familiar terminology.
  - nvrspyx 6y ago
    I don't think it's intentionally misleading. Its roots are in gaming in which "server" is often the term used for an instance and no one misconstrues ownership in that context. Some games let you self-host a server, but it's increasingly rare. More commonly, you reserve/join an instance on the developer's servers and you tell your friend(s), "Come join my server". Whether that be a Minecraft Realm or a WoW shard. Or they could just be adopting the terminology of TeamSpeak and the like.
  - jaywalk 6y ago
    I think it's more that gamers understand the concept of a "server" and not really anything to do with your evil theory.
  - tester756 6y ago
swiley 6y ago
geese I can't stand the UI. The worst part is dealing with muting servers/channels because most admins don't seem to set up reasonable settings (ex: have the main channel always send notifications to everyone on every message.) I never had these problems with IRC in pidgen.
- pteraspidomorph 6y ago
  I don't think it's possible for community admins to have any control over notifications; Those are entirely under your control. That said, I agree with you; those settings can get messy and difficult to manage.
  - smileybarry 6y ago
    They're referring to the default notification settings that admins can set. Annoyingly, the Discord default (when you create a new server) is "All Messages" and not "Only @mentions". Sometimes I find another server still on "all messages" for some reason.
  - zelphirkalt 6y ago
    It is literally right click mute on channels or servers plus you get the choice for how long you want to mute. If that is too difficult to manage ...
    - swiley 6y ago
      Sure it's possible to change, but it's not good. It's really a regression from previous group chat applications. The post I was replying to was arguing that discord is popular because it had a good UI.
      - zelphirkalt 6y ago
        To me it is good UI at least for that, because "Where do you set the volume for a single user?" Well just right click exactly on that user! Where else? It cannot be in global options and it would be too much info for always displaying it under each user name. It belong in that context menu. Solid UI for me.
debaserab2 6y ago
Now that Discord has taken such a strong foothold I wish they would offer an "enterprise" skin or something like that because I would love to replace my work's Slack chat with Discord. Discord is miles ahead of Slack in terms of stability.
- LiroXIV 6y ago
  Switch to light mode?
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  I keep hearing this but slack always works for me? never crashes, audio always works, I get notification when I should. Am I doing something wrong? I've never used discord, full disclosure.
madeofpalk 6y ago
It's interesting - I think i find the opposite to be true, but that's still the appeal. I used Slack before I used Discord, so I compare the two a lot. I think Slack is more polished and playful while remaining mildly professional. Discord I think has a more nerdy and less polished interface, which I think is a part of it's appeal.
Kaze404 6y ago
Really? As someone who's been using Discord since 2015 the interface is by far the worst aspect of it in my opinion. The desktop client has a minimum width, the channel list is not resizable, Ctrl+K for some reason doesn't prioritize channels in the current server, no tabs, you now need 2 clicks to reach your mentions instead of 1, if you don't have access / don't want to use a scrollwheel the server list is literally unusable (and even then, it feel awful reaching for the last servers), the client lags insanely hard if you're in a voice chat (Linux 5.8.14 with RX 5700 XT), virtually no accessibility features (besides TTS, which admittedly was there from the start)... These are the UI complaints I have that I can list from memory. There's a bunch more regarding to how the service is operated (especially support), but it's overall not really a good experience for me. Definitely better than Skype, though that's a very low bar. Edit: Oh, and no threads. That's Slack's best feature by far.
- zelphirkalt 6y ago
  Threads in Slack suck so hard though (no recursive threads, no way to answer one specific message in a thread making it a subthread) and Slack itself is approximately one fifth as performance as Discord. On a modern machine I have 4 cores 100% usage for 20 after starting plus lots of CPU usage when switching channels or opening threads.
hnick 6y ago
I find playfulness great but it can backfire when a serious problem crops up. Then it starts looking like unprofessionalism. This might be why Discord themselves have said not to use it for serious business in companies (I can't find the quote and don't know if they say that anymore, but they definitely used to). I think it's an amazing piece of software. Every single day that I have to use Lync or MS Teams at work I miss the easy copy/paste interface and all the rest. My only gripe is that notifications are unreliable and spotty on my phone. I tried making a chatroom with a couple of friends but they had similar issues so we all moved back to Whatsapp. Maybe they've fixed those in the last year or so.
Razengan 6y ago
> Their playful approach makes it fun to be there. This right here was one of the biggest reasons for the popularity of the Mac and Apple’s other early stuff. They’re not so playful right now, but the aesthetics are still a big part of why so many people love to “be there”, while other people can’t understand that and deride it as “form over function” and blahblah
p0nce 6y ago
+1 it's all about the UX. It's just an incremental improvement against any competitor of the times (infinite logs, efficient search, multi-server, easy bots, audio chat rooms that work better...). It's pretty clear Discord has talented _designers_. And better UX has made Discord increasingly useful to conduct business on.

by krm01 6y ago

anchpop 6y ago

Discord has so many features that make it feel like it was made by and for gamers. Like the "currently playing" statuses, or "streamer mode" that hides identifying info when you have OBS open. It also works better than anything else for large communities with its roles/notifications system. It has a good design but I don't see it as particularly playful, just really well executed

gverrilla 6y ago
There are random joke-lines when you open the program. Also the logo is funny. That's about it for fun, but I think the joke-lines are there just to deviate attention from the fact that discord updates every 2 or 3 days which is annooying.

panorama 6y ago

Yeah, Discord still impresses me with how clean the interface _feels_ to put it simply. I remember only being on the Discord web client for a long time and remarking how much I enjoyed the interactions despite not being a native app. Then I loaded up the console and was pleasantly surprised to see it was all built in React. I suddenly felt very insecure about my own skill with React :p

ma2rten 6y ago

Can you be more specific? It seems to that Discord is very similar to slack.

zelphirkalt 6y ago
Not at all. Slack is noticably sluggish and has notable delay whenever I click a channel. In Discord those things are instant for me. Slack has a silly Markdown parser, while in Discord is simply works. The list goes on.

brundolf 6y ago

The playfulness is endearing, but there's something about the way the UI is structured that always feels a bit disorienting to me, even after having used it for years now. It's generally easy to find what you're looking for, but you're always "figuring it out"; it's hard to pin things down as having a concrete, spatial location. You never quite have a stable notion of "where you are". I don't know how else to describe it. It's worth noting that I don't feel this way about Slack (mostly). It has a clear visual hierarchy of Servers > Channels/DMs > Messages [> Threads]. Discord has things linked every-which-way; someone will start a group call and it's somehow separate from the shared server you're on, living in a whole separate subtree of the interface. Maybe the difference is that Discord accounts are cross-server? So you have conversations that live in a server, and conversations that live outside of any particular server?

wodenokoto 6y ago
Calling workspaces for servers is actually a bit of an “aha”-moment for me. I’ve found slack super confusing and counter-intuitive in how Cumbersome it is to log in to my workspaces on, for example, my phone. This is because I don’t have a slack account but multiple accounts - one for each workspace and all of them connected to the same email (so for me as a user they’re the same account. come on - Why do I have to sign up every time?) The UI around this has improved tremendously over the last 6 months, but it is still not great.
- zacharycohn 6y ago
  Oh man, I HATE that discord ties everything to the same email. I have personal discords, work discords, side project-based discords, and community discords. I want different handles for them, I want DMs to be grouped by discord - not into a single giant bucket, I want notification emails to go to different emails. The biggest blocker to me enjoying discord is that it assumes I'm the same person across all the groups.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    While a perfectly good point, it's also why it caught on. You log in once. Now you just click "Join" on servers you want. Like how Reddit spares you from registering for 100 forums.

matsemann 6y ago

> Their playful approach makes it fun to be there When lockdown started the huge company I am contracting for decided to try Discord. It was a hilarious clash between corporate culture and gaming culture for a month. I think they've toned down some of it now? (We ended up with teams) https://i.imgur.com/eVwStvT.png https://i.imgur.com/eVwStvT.png

judge2020 6y ago
Yes, but it's still not business-oriented. Slack still is better from an admin standpoint. https://blog.discord.com/your-place-to-talk-a7ffa19b901b https://blog.discord.com/your-place-to-talk-a7ffa19b901b https://discord.com https://discord.com
- pavel_lishin 6y ago
  Yup - Slack is geared for teams, and Discord is geared for groups. Discord has much better moderation tools - permissions, roles, etc; Discord makes it easy to run a server strangers can join. Slack has virtually no moderation tools at all, and even at the paid tiers, it's weak. Slack is a very poor choice for anything but a tight-knit top-down administrated group, where moderation can happen outside the app itself.
mturmon 6y ago
Screenshot was perfect, thanks.
rkangel 6y ago
I seriously considered trying to move my software team onto Discord (the majority use it anyway in their personal life). The concept of always on voice channels that you can pop in and out of and see who is in is great. I'm actually a fan of Teams (which is what we're using), but that lowering of the barrier of a team member popping in to ask a question or join a chat would have been great.
moksly 6y ago
I think a lot of enterprise is going to end up on Teams simply because it’s part of your Office365 package. It’s kind of hard to justify paying for something that you already have, and it integrating so well with the rest of the 365 package makes it a lot easier to roll out in a non-tech savvy enterprise. Being the public sector, we’ve gone through a lot of different things, even a few specifically build for business-to-client video chats with encryption, and I can’t recall anything that has been as easy to implement as teams. We have a lot of people, like a thousand employees, who never learned how to use Skype for Business, most of them now use teams seamlessly. The fact that Microsoft are building things into it at a fairly rapid pace, and even by suggestion from users like us (the ability to hide team emails from outlook). Makes it fairly valuable. I mean, I’m in development and not operations, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a presentation platform that could be used by the political layer with so little support before those team meetings where you present to a muted audience. I personally prefer discords IRC-like bits, and use discord at home like everyone else, but it’s getting really hard to compete with teams in an enterprise setting.

formerly_proven 6y ago

A big difference between Discord and almost everything else is that server admins aren't real admins and see no more account data than everyone else on the server. This means people can freely join "hostile" servers and servers with untrusted admins, which is important for gaming, considering the toxicity of many communities.

josteink 6y ago
> A big difference between Discord and almost everything else is that server admins aren't real admins That’s because discord “servers” aren’t real servers and it’s all a whole big closed-source SaaS. “Server” is a clearly an intentionally misleading term and dark UX used to lure people into thinking they are have actual ownership and control of their fealty SaaS workspaces. Sadly, given the success of Discord, it seems this lie has paid off big-time though.
- mrkcsc 6y ago
  We called them servers because our early adopters were coming from Ventrillo and Teamspeak (eg: Vent server, Teamspeak server, etc) and we wanted to use familiar terminology.
- nvrspyx 6y ago
  I don't think it's intentionally misleading. Its roots are in gaming in which "server" is often the term used for an instance and no one misconstrues ownership in that context. Some games let you self-host a server, but it's increasingly rare. More commonly, you reserve/join an instance on the developer's servers and you tell your friend(s), "Come join my server". Whether that be a Minecraft Realm or a WoW shard. Or they could just be adopting the terminology of TeamSpeak and the like.
- jaywalk 6y ago
  I think it's more that gamers understand the concept of a "server" and not really anything to do with your evil theory.
- tester756 6y ago

swiley 6y ago

geese I can't stand the UI. The worst part is dealing with muting servers/channels because most admins don't seem to set up reasonable settings (ex: have the main channel always send notifications to everyone on every message.) I never had these problems with IRC in pidgen.

pteraspidomorph 6y ago
I don't think it's possible for community admins to have any control over notifications; Those are entirely under your control. That said, I agree with you; those settings can get messy and difficult to manage.
- smileybarry 6y ago
  They're referring to the default notification settings that admins can set. Annoyingly, the Discord default (when you create a new server) is "All Messages" and not "Only @mentions". Sometimes I find another server still on "all messages" for some reason.
- zelphirkalt 6y ago
  It is literally right click mute on channels or servers plus you get the choice for how long you want to mute. If that is too difficult to manage ...
  - swiley 6y ago
    Sure it's possible to change, but it's not good. It's really a regression from previous group chat applications. The post I was replying to was arguing that discord is popular because it had a good UI.
    - zelphirkalt 6y ago
      To me it is good UI at least for that, because "Where do you set the volume for a single user?" Well just right click exactly on that user! Where else? It cannot be in global options and it would be too much info for always displaying it under each user name. It belong in that context menu. Solid UI for me.

debaserab2 6y ago

Now that Discord has taken such a strong foothold I wish they would offer an "enterprise" skin or something like that because I would love to replace my work's Slack chat with Discord. Discord is miles ahead of Slack in terms of stability.

LiroXIV 6y ago
Switch to light mode?
stjohnswarts 6y ago
I keep hearing this but slack always works for me? never crashes, audio always works, I get notification when I should. Am I doing something wrong? I've never used discord, full disclosure.

madeofpalk 6y ago

It's interesting - I think i find the opposite to be true, but that's still the appeal. I used Slack before I used Discord, so I compare the two a lot. I think Slack is more polished and playful while remaining mildly professional. Discord I think has a more nerdy and less polished interface, which I think is a part of it's appeal.

Kaze404 6y ago

Really? As someone who's been using Discord since 2015 the interface is by far the worst aspect of it in my opinion. The desktop client has a minimum width, the channel list is not resizable, Ctrl+K for some reason doesn't prioritize channels in the current server, no tabs, you now need 2 clicks to reach your mentions instead of 1, if you don't have access / don't want to use a scrollwheel the server list is literally unusable (and even then, it feel awful reaching for the last servers), the client lags insanely hard if you're in a voice chat (Linux 5.8.14 with RX 5700 XT), virtually no accessibility features (besides TTS, which admittedly was there from the start)... These are the UI complaints I have that I can list from memory. There's a bunch more regarding to how the service is operated (especially support), but it's overall not really a good experience for me. Definitely better than Skype, though that's a very low bar. Edit: Oh, and no threads. That's Slack's best feature by far.

zelphirkalt 6y ago
Threads in Slack suck so hard though (no recursive threads, no way to answer one specific message in a thread making it a subthread) and Slack itself is approximately one fifth as performance as Discord. On a modern machine I have 4 cores 100% usage for 20 after starting plus lots of CPU usage when switching channels or opening threads.

hnick 6y ago

I find playfulness great but it can backfire when a serious problem crops up. Then it starts looking like unprofessionalism. This might be why Discord themselves have said not to use it for serious business in companies (I can't find the quote and don't know if they say that anymore, but they definitely used to). I think it's an amazing piece of software. Every single day that I have to use Lync or MS Teams at work I miss the easy copy/paste interface and all the rest. My only gripe is that notifications are unreliable and spotty on my phone. I tried making a chatroom with a couple of friends but they had similar issues so we all moved back to Whatsapp. Maybe they've fixed those in the last year or so.

Razengan 6y ago

> Their playful approach makes it fun to be there. This right here was one of the biggest reasons for the popularity of the Mac and Apple’s other early stuff. They’re not so playful right now, but the aesthetics are still a big part of why so many people love to “be there”, while other people can’t understand that and deride it as “form over function” and blahblah

p0nce 6y ago

+1 it's all about the UX. It's just an incremental improvement against any competitor of the times (infinite logs, efficient search, multi-server, easy bots, audio chat rooms that work better...). It's pretty clear Discord has talented _designers_. And better UX has made Discord increasingly useful to conduct business on.