Tips to Improve Discord Experience?

[Argyle King]

There's no way to sugar coat it, I struggle with the Discord user interface. I find it unintuitive and frustrating, and the new (to me) updates that have been added have made the experience even worse for me. A lot of the features (such as the search function) don't even seem to work on the mobile app.

Unfortunately, Discord is also commonly used along gaming groups as a way to communicate.

I'm willing to admit that maybe I'm just out of touch with contemporary communication platforms. So, maybe it's just me.

With that in mind, do you have any general tips for making the experience better? Even trying to do basic navigation of the platform is something that I find unintuitive.

 

[Blue]

Hate to say it, but just use it a lot. Practice will make things will become intuitive.

 

[GuardianLurker]

My group and I have been using it for years. I've found the basic functionality covers all my needs - I run a few voice channels (game. Gm private, player private) and a few text channels and it's mostly fire and forget at that point. Except for the voice and video settings, as Discord has a habit of losing my inputs/outputs. Especially bluetooth ones. Switching to a wired USB headset has really reduced those headaches.

 

[payn]

I use Discord on PC during the day and when im online gaming. Its much easier to use that way than mobile, IME.

 

[cranberry]

I agree that Discord UI is bad, but I second Blue's advice.

 

[Umbran]

Well, don't feel too bad. In general, (and my apologies to fans of the thing) Discord's UI/UX... just ain't that great. You can get used to it, but it won't be good unless they revisit the overall user-design aspects of it.

 

[Ryujin]

Whatever you do, don't @ here or @ everyone, and try to keep others from doing it. It makes the experience oh, so much worse for everyone.

I'm also a PC user. Home on the app and work via web. It makes navigating the various groups far easier, for me, though i still occasionally hit a voice channel accidentally.

 

[Jahydin]

With that in mind, do you have any general tips for making the experience better? Even trying to do basic navigation of the platform is something that I find unintuitive.

In my experience, how the particular Discord server is setup really defines how useful it is to use. See ShadowDark's server for a well organized and easy to navigate example. Notice how the SD-Creators-Forum and SD-Questions-Forum are setup in a forum style? Really like that.

Another major factor is how popular the server is. If it's frequented by 10,000,000 people, doesn't matter how organized it is, things are going to be chaotic. Only use these if you plan on just "dropping in" and having a quick chat about whatever topic is already floating around. I prefer smaller sized ones, like the Troll Lord server (Castles & Crusades).

Honestly though, Discord will never replace forums for me. Even well setup servers tend to have only a couple channels people will post to, and nothing's more frustrating than seeing some houserule you worked for years on get instantly buried by several users discussing what they had for breakfast...

 

[Argyle King]

Is there a way to search for a channel?

With as popular as the platform is, I had thought the user interface would be better. I stopped using it for a while and then came back to it, and the "new and improved" Discord is worse than I remember.

 

[Jahydin]

Is there a way to search for a channel?

Google, honestly.

If nothing comes up, Google "Scary Clown Discord Reddit" (or whatever) then comb through Reddit for a posted link.