Discord Project Rapidash
I led product strategy and design for Project Rapidash, a zero-to-one project focused on helping users find recurring gaming groups. Through rapid iteration and testing, we developed identity and discovery features to help users find new servers, play games, and make new friends.
Design Lead
Jan 2024 —
Helping people find new gaming friends on Discord.
Timeframe
Jan 2024 —
Context
With the renewed company focus on gaming, we conducted social gaming user research which revealed an unmet need for making new friends. Turns out Discord originally centered on playing games with friends, but small, highly retentive friend servers remain undiscoverable, and only large communities are discoverable today. Our hypothesis is that if we host a collection of healthy friend servers that play games together and welcome new members, then people will join these servers, reach CPV at higher rates, and have a path to HFU.
Solution
We developed identity and discovery features to help smaller servers recruit new members and connect users with servers to make new friends. Inspired by matchmaking apps, we focused on pairing users based on games, skills, and interests while ensuring these servers are safe and welcoming. After testing multiple concepts, we will be launching these features (Server Profiles, Tags, and Membership Applications) in Q1 2025 as standalone features for all servers to maximize their impact.
Thanks to
Dabney Donigan, Lily Jen, Hong Ye Xu, Sharon Coone, Cat Tan, Derek Hammer, Matthew Kleppin, Stephanie Wang, Marcus Huderle, Alec Lee, Tem Gareys, and many more.
We explored many, many different friend making concepts in the span of two weeks.
Server Profile lets servers express themselves with customizable decorations, traits, games, and more.
Members can wear Tags next to their name to show off their association with the server.
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