Keaton Taylor

Research

Before diving into design, our team conducted extensive user research. Collaborating with industry experts, we held weekly design sessions, using data as our guiding star. Our collective efforts revealed that over 50% of Discord users were willing to pay between $2 and $5 for the new feature, validating our direction and giving us the green light to proceed.

Challenges and Opportunities

Even with really positive feedback from our research and initial tests it was no easy feat navigating through technical and operational hurdles to seamlessly integrate it into synchronous voice calls.

Challenges & Solutions

• Technical Constraints
  Difficulty in embedding Activities via an iframe, particularly for games requiring real-time interaction. This was a challenge because Discord's infrastructure was built completely for this synchronous communication loop - while we were thinking about asynch communication and spontaneous synchronicity through viral loops - work we wouldn't get to for literal years.
• Executive Pushback: Resistance to making changes to the chat interface, necessitating an alternative approach for Activities integration. Alterations to the video and voice calling UI were less contentious since the video and voice engagement numbers were dwarfed by chat.
• Design Consistency: The challenge of incorporating Activities into the existing voice experience without disrupting the user interface. Regardless of engagement, there were expectations around how the voice chat would work and I created this world where we created consistency of expectation when there was not necessarily a consistency of UI or style.

Opportunities

• User Engagement: The high willingness to pay for Activities suggests potential for revenue growth and increased user retention. If we could attract a new breed of user to pay for an existing monetization, but attribute it to activities, that's a huge win.
• Expanded Offerings: The interest in a variety of games opens the door for partnerships with game developers, diversifying the Activities feature set. We would have early conversations with well-known web-game studios and eventually support a variety of second and third party games to go along with our embedded studio titles.
• Community Building: The Activities feature can enhance social interaction on the platform, potentially attracting a broader user demographic. We saw this at Backyard - where deepening connections was our primary goal and we got feedback through email, Discord server, and TikTok that playing these games with friends and acquaintances made them closer and spread the use to new circles of influence.

Hypotheses

1. Integrating Activities will increase user engagement and retention for both the voice channel feature and the app.

2. The willingness of users to pay for Activities suggests a new, potentially lucrative revenue stream.

3. Activities will deepen user connections for our key user groups and expand Discord's community.

4. First Party Activities will draw more developers to Discord, creating a vibrant the developer ecosystem, similarly to bots.

The Design Process

Early Explorations

In the early stages of this project, our first task was to immerse ourselves in Discord's existing design language. Fortunately, the organization had already invested in robust Design Systems and Sticker Sheets, enabling us to prototype at a higher fidelity than is often possible. Over the first few weeks, we focused on conceptualizing how Discord's platform could evolve to accommodate activities, particularly within the framework of a two-sided marketplace for both developers and end-users.

To ensure we were on the right track, we held feedback sessions involving product managers, engineers, and our design team. These meetings served as pivotal checkpoints, allowing us to present our ideas to leadership for validation and to identify areas requiring iteration. Interestingly, our initial designs were considered too ambitious, prompting us to pivot towards a more iterative and component-driven approach. This shift led us to explore specific questions that would guide our subsequent design efforts. All of this exploration led to some more structural questions we wanted to dive into - here are a couple of examples:

What are some of the best-case scenario primitives for how we integrate Activities into the wider product?

Like "how might we's" around notifications, Active now, and how we can represent ongoing activity presence in places like someone's profile.

What can we ship quickly to test the waters on how users will receive this change?

A huge piece of this exploration work was to make a call on how we might start testing the hypothesis that activities are A. Wanted and B. will deepen connections as folks use them. Luckily we were working with users from our previous startup, Backyard, to create a coalition of folks to come try this new thing we were working on.

Overall Results

• - We exceeded our MRR goals by nearly 2x.
• - Week-1 retention rates consistently hovered between 20-30%.
• - Voice channel usage saw a significant uptick, correlating with increased platform engagement.

TechRadar Feature

Discord Activities might be its most ingenious addition yet

Read more about how Discord is innovating with its new Activities feature. This might be a game-changer!

Learnings

This project was a marathon, not a sprint. I was able to use and hone skills in stakeholder management, data-driven decision-making, and agile methodologies. The most valuable lesson was the importance of agility and strong partnerships. Collaborating closely with a like-minded engineering partner was instrumental in our success.