Discord Communities
During the pandemic, more people began using Discord for communities outside of gaming. To support this shift, I led the design and strategy for the Communities initiative, making it easier to join, engage with, and moderate communities on Discord.
Design Lead
2021 — 2022
Making Discord the best place for communities to talk and hang out online.
Timeframe
2021 — 2022
Context
During the pandemic, Discord evolved from a voice chat app for gamers to a platform for all sorts of communities, from schools and tech to gardening and Harry Potter. In fact, large communities were the fastest growing segment on Discord both in server and net retained user growth. Despite the higher demand, our product experience was lackluster as it was originally designed for smaller gaming servers. It was challenging to onboard into a community and participate, overwhelming to keep up, and difficult to moderate. This led us to invest in features specific to communities to make them great places for people to hang out online.
Solution
We improved the community product across three key areas: 1) helping people onboard and find value; 2) creating new ways for members to engage; 3) empowering admins to set up their communities for success. We approached communities as a distinct product, optimizing for its specific use case and focusing on what makes Discord unique: synchronous, people-to-people interaction.
Thanks to
Rick Ling, Jonathan Lin, Dabney Donigan, Sharon Coone, Chloe Shih, Milan Samuel, Selina Her, Sam Grossberg, Derek Hammer, Matthew Kleppin, Stephanie Wang, and many more.
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