case Study

Discord Threads

Solo designer
Nov 3
 - 
Dec 23
Tool Stack
Case Study

What is Discord?

Discord is a group communication tool originally developed for video-gamers. Recently it has shown to also be useful for school groups, friend groups, and virtual communities.

Problem

Regular users of Discord find that conversations in large groups can often get messy. This provides an unpleasant experience for users, and can lead some to miss important information.

‍

How Might We‍

How might we allow users to keep track of messages?

I believe that adding threads will allow users to keep track of conversations and declutter servers channels.

User Research

I put together 3 surveys that I sent out to the Discordapp Reddit page and received some quality responses. I felt that the survey results were good but I could do more digging to find some real meaty problems. This is when I had my "aha" moment. The Discord forums were flooded with requests to make it easier to keep track of messages.

Friction points

Threads
  • Channels can get really messy
  • Conversations can easily get lost in the mix
  • Better way to keep up with messages
Stream Experience
  • Better stream quality without paying extra
  • Ability to watch multiple streams (pre-patch)
  • Mac compatibility

Takeaways

  • 72% of users said they would benefit from threads
  • 95% of users said they would be more engaged in channel conversations if threads were added

Competitor Research

Slack
Guilded.gg

I decided to review slack since it was mentioned many times in the user feedback. They do a really good job with threads, making the experience more organized. I did find however, they might add a bit of cognitive overload with threads being added to the right sidebar. It doesn't feel like a very focused environment. I took that into account when sketching wireframes.

Define

Using reponses from Discord users in the forums, I grabbed all the comments from the first page of 668 comments. I only found one response that didnt think it was necessary to add threads. Something to note is 3077 people upvoted the idea to add threads.

‍

‍

Information Architecture

Before getting started in sketching I hopped back into FigJam to get a visual of how the information will be displayed to the user.

From here I have a good idea on how I want to display this new feature, visually, to the user.

LoFi Sketches

‍

HiFi Mockup

Current Stage

What’s a Rich Text element?

The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.

Static and dynamic content editing

A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

Style Guide

Contact

Connect with me

You can get in contact with me by filling out this form

Thank you! Your message has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.