The Notifications You Want: A Feature to Discord
Discord connects friends and communities through servers where people can chat, call, steam, and more. Some people wish the notifications were better. In this project we discover how we can improve Discord’s notifications and design a solution to help. This project involves a very small team, with me as the UX designer. This is only a proposed solution and not done with Discord.
Add a Feature Project
1 UX Designer Team
Group Chat Platform
June 2025 (3 Weeks)
Broken up into 3 phases with a conclusion
Designing Better Discord Notifications
Phase 1
But What is the Problem?
The Initial Problem
Users tend to have a lot of different servers and lots of different notifications, but the platform doesn’t filter the user’s notifications in a way that helps the user most. Users can manually mute servers and individual channels, but not sort their notifications
The Initial Goal
Add the feature of sorting notifications to discord in a way that most improves the users’ experience.
A Fluid Research Approach
Conducting research methods at the same time to build off of each other. This resulted in a more informed competitor analysis from conducting user interviews at the same time. This might be a good technique for the future.
The Research Goal
We want to learn how our users currently use their discord notifications and how we can improve notifications for them.
Competitive Analysis
A Review of 3 Competitor Platforms.
User Interviews
6 remote user interviews with 7 participants; 15 - 40 minute interviews with adults in their 20s-40s, 1 interview with 2 participants.
(7/7) There is a want to consistently receive relevant notifications from new and seasoned users alike
(4/7) Newer users - receiving a lot of unnecessary notifications
(3/7) Seasoned users - missing or delay of notifications that are important to them (they already have their notifications highly customized with muting servers and channels)
Affinity Map
To draw further insights from the user interviews.
Answer to the Research Goal
Users want to consistently receive notifications that are important to them, and other platforms are not currently providing a way to get priority notifications, just to mute things.
We do have a gap in the market and a want for that gap to be filled.
Framing the Problem
Personas to Keep In Mind
To keep our insights from the user interviews accurate when designing a solution to help them.
Primary Persona
Secondary Persona
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Point of View Statement
Sam here uses discord to hang out with friends, engage in communities they care about and game. They’ve been using discord for awhile and are very good at navigating the platform. However… They're still frustrated with inconsistently getting notifications they care about, especially delays in getting time sensitive ones, and wish they could fine tune their settings more quickly.
Point of View Statement
Elsa here uses discord because that’s where the communities are for her education and to advance career-wise. But discord is confusing and overwhelming to her, and she struggles to quickly figure out if a notification is important among all the irrelevant notifications she gets.
Project Goals to Keep in Mind
To remember our goals for the business, user, and technical considerations to keep in min when designing the solution.
THE Question to Start Ideation
How Might We send notifications our users care about most as quickly and consistently as possible?
Phase 2
Designing the Solution
An Organized Ideation Approach
Being so organized helped me more thoroughly think through ideas and arrive at a solution quickly (however, it would been better with a team to bounce ideas off of each other - the solution had needed more perspectives in order to prevent a flaw that was only found in the late stage of the process - user testing).
The Feature Set
To know what all be under the umbrella of this new feature to Discord notifications.
Low Fidelity Wireframes From Screenshots
How the Notifications Would Behave
Putting it into Testable Tasks
Wire Flow Iterations
Phase 3
The Solution in Action
High Fidelity Wire Flows Before Testing
Usability Testing
6 usability tests run through Maze - 3 remote unmoderated tests, and 3 in-person moderated usability tests.
Research Goal
Validate if users find the new priority notification system intuitive, and what area(s) could use improvement.
Flow 1
selecting various priority notifications.
Flow 2
receiving priority notifications.
(1/6) participants not completing the flow
(3/6) participants only clicking the star icon from just clicking around
4.75 of 10 average rating of the ease of completing this flow
(6/6) participants completed the flow
9.8 of 10 average rating of the ease of completing this flow
"I like the red star that says priority, i think it makes it easier to pick out as important"
The process of selecting priority notifications was not intuitive, and requires improvement. However, the process of receiving notifications was easy and intuitive for participants.
Conclusion
Next Steps for the Project
1. Usability test again to see if priority system makes sense due to how much it didn’t with the last usability test
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Adjust current flow 1 path/prompt to test if users think having the option to prioritize notifications on the main screens, not just in settings, is actually helpful (initially done like this so users can who don’t understand settings well can use this feature, and seasoned users can change this frequently depending on what notifications they need more for that hour or day)
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See if icon is clear, not too dense
2. Definitely have a coachmark for launch - there was a lot of feedback that something like that would have been helpful from the usability test
Reflection on How to Be a Better Designer
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Keep it simple and don’t overthink things: better solutions and less stress for me
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Keeping notes of what I plan to do next and my thought process is a fabulous way for me to stay organized and be transparent about what’s happening
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Go for the most efficient and effective way to finish project
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To always have a reason for every change to existing UI