Every single Discord-related post here I see comments about the "bad ux".
I'm a heavy Discord user and I have no complaints with the UX, I find it pretty intuitive to be honest.
I'm also constantly seeing people in shock that people would choose to use Discord over IRC/Matrix/Teamspeak/Mumble. I find Discord to be light years ahead of anything else available, and for an average person who's going to have a hard time setting up any of those, the difference is even bigger. Plus, Discord's free, you don't have to host it, and all your friends and communities are already there. It's really a no brainer for most people.
What's intuitive about having to click one of the tiniest buttons in a corner of the screen to disconnect voice chat? I literally killed the process a couple times when I started using Discord because I couldn't find it. Why can I double-click to join a channel but not leave with any UI in the same area?
It also took me a while to figure out how to quit the damn thing. The only way seems to be right-clicking the tray icon. Which is nice as long as you have a tray in the first place. Having a "File > Quit" menu wouldn't have hurt. Or a button in the same menu that lets me log out and disable the account.
And judging by the fan noise in my laptop the Discord app seems to be a heavier burden than my Firefox session with over 1000 tabs. Now at least it's not particularly slow, but I don't understand why I should use Discord unless I have to.
Ah, you're right, I didn't see that setting. The button to disconnect is white for me, though. I'll have to look again next time, maybe I'm going crazy.
> It's just inherent to being an electron app I guess.
A barebones Electron app has maybe ~100MB memory overhead and starts without noticeable delay. To me this seems like the same problem that leads to oversized and sluggish websites. Snappy, lightweight Electron apps exist, though they're uncommon.
> How about clicking the bright red phone hang up button.
That isn't always there. If you navigate away from the voice channel page to read something, your only option is that tiny little button on the corner; or navigating back to the voice channel page, which is unintuitive itself.
> Every single Discord-related post here I see comments about the "bad ux". I'm a heavy Discord user and I have no complaints with the UX
Since I started using Discord, they have on three separate occasions moved a button I used frequently, and in its place added a button that attempts to extract money from me.
They've established a pattern of trying to monetise the application by tricking the user into doing something that they didn't want to do. That isn't just bad UX, it's actively hostile.
I don't think tricking is the word for this. You're not going to click something by accident and be immediately billed for something. Yes, they've made monetisation more prominent, but I think that's fair for a platform that's free to use. I'd rather they attempt to get more revenue out of users via premium features than have to shut down cause they were operating at a loss.
Tricking is 100% the right word for it. They are putting those Nitro buttons there with the clear intent that a user will click it by accident while attempting to access a different feature that used to be there.
> You're not going to click something by accident and be immediately billed for something.
If it didn't work, they wouldn't be doing it. I'm not claiming that they're outright scamming people out of money, but that they're using actively hostile UI/UX to profit by serving advertisements for Nitro when someone was trying to upload a photo. That's absolutely worthy of criticism.
> advertisements for Nitro when someone was trying to upload a photo
The gifting button is only beside the upload button on mobile, and personally I've never hit it accidentally. To me it just seems like they've made it more prominent, I don't see any intent to trick people into mis-clicking. Like I've said, I have no problem with them trying to make more money, they need to make a profit to keep providing a free service.
> The gifting button is only beside the upload button on mobile, and personally I've never hit it accidentally. To me it just seems like they've made it more prominent, I don't see any intent to trick people into mis-clicking.
Perhaps you don't remember what that UI used to look like. For most of Discord's existence, there were two buttons to the left of the chatbox in the mobile app. The leftmost of these was a camera icon (for taking a photo and immediately uploading it), and the rightmost was the gallery icon, for uploading an existing image. For the vast majority of users, the gallery icon would have been the most commonly used.
In 2020 they got rid of the camera icon entirely (now requiring an additional menu to get to it), moved the gallery icon, and then where the gallery icon used to be they added the Gift Nitro icon. Instead of using the empty space vacated by the camera icon they moved a feature used >10,000x more so that the Nitro button could benefit from everyone's muscle memory.
At the time it happened misclicks and feeling tricked was an extremely common complaint [1], to the extent that I do not believe for a second that a team of people competent enough to build such an otherwise excellent piece of software could possibly have not foreseen it occurring. That this is not an isolated incident but rather part of a pattern helps cement that judgment.
> Like I've said, I have no problem with them trying to make more money, they need to make a profit to keep providing a free service.
I do have a problem with it, because they're trying to make money by tricking their users. I'm perfectly happy to go back to IRC if the only way they can think of to keep their company afloat is to deliberately make their product worse to use.
>I'm a heavy Discord user and I have no complaints with the UX, I find it pretty intuitive to be honest.
You say this like they should contradict, but heavy use of Discord should only make the UX more intuitive to you. Maybe it's less intuitive to less heavy users?
A lot of the ease of using Discord comes from the fact that every server just works, and you can join using a link. If people could host their own servers I'd imagine you'd end up with poorly-hosted servers that would degrade the overall experience.
Theres only so much even an inexperienced admin can do wrong when hosting something as basic as a chat platform. The various limits a potential machine could have are very obvious immediately. If people could host their own servers the artificial limitations discord is using to extract money from its userbase would be even more incomprehensible, and the network effect wouldn't be nearly as strong because every instance would presumably have its own account registry, both points will prevent discord indefinetly from ever allowing self managed instances.
Tried to ask the Matrix devs about room emotes being broken on Android (though they work on web) and they just ignored me completely. Matrix is simply half baked and somehow barely works so that I keep using it. But they aren't even close to the point where things just work.
I'm also constantly seeing people in shock that people would choose to use Discord over IRC/Matrix/Teamspeak/Mumble. I find Discord to be light years ahead of anything else available, and for an average person who's going to have a hard time setting up any of those, the difference is even bigger. Plus, Discord's free, you don't have to host it, and all your friends and communities are already there. It's really a no brainer for most people.