Discord's Activity Log
Your place to talk - without missed connections
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Overview
Discord is a free Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) text, voice, and video call application where users can create communities known as "servers". Within servers, there are channels to communicate with all server members. Users can direct message (DM) other users if they are both members of the same server or if friend requests were accepted.
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With so many active servers and members, it's easy to have missed connections.
Team
Independent project
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Category
Add a feature
User experience
User interface
VoIP
Challenge
How might we help users find individuals they chatted with in channels but forgot their username?
From my qualitative questionnaire, 85% of users out of 17 participants were struggling with the task of finding missed connections and 84% were unaware of Discord's current inbox feature. If they knew about the inbox feature, they were limited to these notification filters:
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replies within channels - when someone clicks "reply" on the user's comment
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@username - when someone @ the specific user
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@role - any roles users gave themselves in servers
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@everyone - all members are notified
Solution
An activity log which acts as an interaction history based on all @mentions, emoji responses and replies in channels, added friends, and events attended.
With an activity log visible to find unlike Discord's current inbox icon, users can easily access and utilize the feature to solve their pain point.
Discord's current inbox feature that alerts people when they are @mentioned and got replies in channel posts. Filter only includes @everyone and @role.
The new added feature includes all @mentions and all the various interactions users can have on Discord.
Displaying a tab in an area users recognize, improves usability over needing to recall the unnoticeable inbox and having limited filter options.
Research
Interviews to Understand How They Think and Feel
To gain insight on users' experiences, I conducted seven interviews with people who use Discord everyday. The user pain point was something I didn't expect. They were frustrated with conversations they had with other members on servers' channels. If they didn't think to add members as a friend, they wouldn't remember their username and spend time looking for the people they wanted to continue chatting with.
Contextual Inquiry to Delve into Their Experiences
With this, contextual inquiries were performed to observe how users find people who are not on their friend's list. Seeing it firsthand helped me understand how users went about this process and why they were frustrated. After a few attempts, the user gives up, causing a missed connection until another unknown opportunity with this user appears as shown in the current user flow.
The Users & Their Experience
User Flow Explained through a Storyboard
Endless scrolling
Users first opt to using Discord's search bar which requires precise word-for-word context. It includes a lot of guessing and search results not being what the user was looking for or "no results found". So the user ends up scrolling through conversations in channels they think they chatted in, to find the person they're looking for. It wastes time and they might not succeed in their task.
The qualitative research contradicts Discord's CEO, Jason Citron's blog post "We designed Discord for talking. There’s no endless scrolling...We designed Discord to enable the experience and feelings we wanted to recreate: being together with your community and friends."
The Persona Who Wants to Keep in Touch
Based on the user interviews, Michael was created to understand the target user and their Discord needs. They want to keep in touch with friends and meet new people. They want to connect with people they've chatted with in channels without the frustration of searching for them. This helped me with my design decisions.
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Planning
Reuse Existing Features for Familiarity
The current Discord UI can be found here.
Four solutions in Figma were presented to a UX Designer, a Software Engineer, and an avid Discord user to discuss my reasons for each option and to get feedback. We brainstormed and came up with solution #5. This is a combination of two solutions I thought of: instead of adding new icon next to the inbox or adding more filters in the "mentions" tab, there was an "interactions" tab created within Discord's inbox.
I was advised that if there are existing features, it would be helpful to reuse it because users are familiar with them and it wouldn't be costly for the company to implement.
Discovery: Problem with My Solution
Unfortunately the excitement ended when I learned most of my friends didn't know an inbox existed. So I questioned if my solution solved the problem and sent out a qualitative questionnaire. It gave a scenario of the pain point and asked how users find messages they were notified for.
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85% of 17 participants mentioned trying to figure out keywords to use for the search bar or scrolling through channels when they forgot someone's username. This validated the pain point that my interviewees were experiencing.
This revealed my solution within the inbox icon wouldn't be helpful because 84% of qualitative questionnaire responses showed people don't know about Discord's inbox feature.
A Business Perspective: What does this mean for Discord?
Every year, the number of monthly active users increased drastically. Based on the qualitative questionnaire, if 85% of users were struggling with the task of finding missed connections, that's 119 million frustrated users. With 84% of participants not knowing about Discord's current inbox feature, 117 million users were not using what Discord implemented to prevent the pain point Discord's CEO touched up about scrolling.
The Final Product
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New feature at a visible and convenient location
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Including all the ways users can interact with others
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Following Discord's UI
Usability test task flow was to find the "forgotten username" FancySpaceDragon through emojis, the last interact the user remembers with this person.
Keeping the same action Discord users currently have to direct message someone: clicking on the username or the picture
Keeping the same UI as Discord for the direct message screen. View the prototype here.
With the new discovery from the qualitative questionnaire, I used solution #4 found in my Figma file for the usability testing. All seven participants were able to perform the task of finding and direct messaging the "forgotten" username with the new feature (in this scenario finding FancySpaceDragon by filtering with emoji responses). It took participants less than 2 minutes on the usability test which succeeded my expectations of 5 minutes, the time it takes before people give up on the task. The last reiteration was to make the Activity Log's UI similar to Discord's Friends List UI for consistency. The updated and improved task flow incorporates the activity log, which is in a visible location.
Lesson Learned & Next Steps
What I learned: If users are unaware of the current feature, it should be reworked or displayed somewhere else even if it takes up space.
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What I'm most proud of: are asking people in different industries for feedback and being able to catch a problem before going into the testing phase. It saved me time and would've saved the company a lot of money if they were trying to implement the new feature.
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Next steps: To continue improving the new feature, I would have users be able to expand each box to see what the messages say.
Inspiration & Special Thanks
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Thank you to A.Y. (Engineer), R.M. (UX Designer), I.C. (avid Discord user) for taking the time to help me come up with a solution.
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Thank you to all the UXUI servers that have helped me throughout my career change journey.
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Thanks to all the friends I've made on Discord who were my inspiration for this project and for being interviewees.