A platform with 250 million users that hasn't solved its most basic problem.
Discord has over 250 million monthly users and still hasn't addressed one of the most basic functions any messaging platform should have — the ability to organize your direct messages.
I've been on Discord since it launched. Over the years the problem has only gotten worse. Bots, friends, mutuals. Everything lands in the same chronological list with no way to filter, categorize or prioritize. Important messages get buried. Old conversations are nearly impossible to find. Even the search function returns so many results it creates more noise than it cuts through.
This project set out to understand how widespread that frustration actually was, and what Discord could do about it. It followed the Design Thinking methodology, completed over three months as part of a four person team. My role covered user research, interview facilitation, and synthesizing insights into actionable recommendations.
Every message you receive lands in the same list. Friends, bots, group chats. All of it stacked in order of whoever messaged you last.
I've been on Discord for 8 years. The direct messaging experience hasn't changed much. There's no way to pin important conversations to the top. No way to separate group chats from individual messages. If you're part of multiple active group chats and someone messages you, that group chat gets buried under everything else.
Searching for an older message isn't much better. You navigate to a specific person's DM, open the search bar, and filter by user, data type or mentions. It's a multi-step process to find something that should take seconds. And none of it helps you when you don't remember exactly who sent the message or which chat it was in.
Designed around Discord's core demographic — 18 to 34.
Discord's largest user demographic falls between 18 and 34 years old, making up roughly 54% of the platform's total user base. That's who we designed this research around.
Our six participants ranged from 19 to 27 years old, split evenly between male and female, and based in Calgary. Occupations varied across students, gamers and tech enthusiasts — all people who use Discord regularly enough to have a real relationship with its limitations.
Students, creatives, content creators. The problem showed up the same way across all of them.
Our participants represented a cross-section of how people actually use Discord. Students managing study groups, creative professionals coordinating projects, content creators juggling community conversations. Too many messages, not enough tools to manage them.
Semi-structured interviews. Six participants. In-person and online via Discord itself.
We conducted semi-structured interviews with six participants, a mix of in-person and online via Discord. Each session ran around 15 minutes and covered message organization, notification handling, prioritization practices and the workarounds people had already built for themselves.
The semi-structured format was a deliberate choice. We wanted participants to elaborate where they felt it was relevant rather than boxing them into yes or no answers. In practice this worked well when participants had strong opinions, and fell short when they didn't.
The most challenging part of the process was writing questions that didn't lead participants toward a specific answer. My team went through several rounds of refinement to keep questions as neutral as possible. Analyzing responses afterward was equally difficult, especially when the data was sparse or inconsistent. We worked through it by cross-referencing each other's findings against Discord's existing design to identify where the gaps were clearest.
The research confirmed what we suspected — and surfaced things we hadn't fully articulated yet.
Three features. Each one addressing a specific gap the research made clear.
What's already working informed these recommendations too. Users rely on bolded unread messages, recently messaged contacts staying at the top, and voice calls for important discussions. These features are doing their job — the recommendations build around them.
Enhanced Search Functionality
Right now finding an older message requires navigating through multiple steps that may or may not get you to what you're looking for. Adding date and keyword filters would let users cut through their message history without having to remember exactly where a conversation happened or who sent it.
Message Pinning
Discord is used for more than casual conversation — commissions, freelance work, gaming coordination, project collaboration. When a conversation matters, there's currently no way to keep it accessible. Pinning would let users surface the chats they actually need without scrolling past everything else to find them.
Customizable Notifications
The only real option users have right now is to mute, which leads to missed messages. Giving users the ability to set specific alert levels for different chats — similar to how Instagram and WhatsApp handle notifications — means they can let important conversations through without being overwhelmed by everything else.
Enhanced Search, Message Pinning, Customizable Notifications.
Three features, visualized. Each screen maps directly to one of the research-backed recommendations.
Six SAIT students don't represent 250 million users.
The most significant limitation of this study was the sample. We recruited from within our class, which meant six SAIT students whose relationship with Discord varied considerably. Some used it regularly, others only occasionally. That inconsistency directly affected the depth of the findings.
A broader recruitment pool would've produced sharper data — gamers managing multiple community servers, freelancers using Discord for commissions, students coordinating study groups, people who use it as their primary social platform. The study also relied entirely on self-reported data. Without observational data there's no way to verify whether what people reported matched how they actually used the platform.
These limitations narrow the confidence we can place in the findings. The next phase of research should prioritize recruiting heavier Discord users across a wider range of use cases.