Temporary Guest Invites
Join a Discord call without needing an account
Company
Discord
Time frame
3 Weeks
Date
March 2023
TL:DR
I was the lead designer working on improving the experience for gamers on Discord. The goal of this project was to let first time users quickly hop into a call with friends without registering for an account.
Partnering with my cross-functional team members I shipped a new Guest Invitation flow that resulted in a 2.9% increase in channel engagement with over 100,000 guest invitations sent in our initial experiment.
The Opportunity
Many new users are introduced to Discord by receiving a link from friends. They need to go through registration, add friends and join the server before they can even participate in the call they were invited to.
This is especially challenging for people sharing links in games where you may only have 30 seconds or a minute before the game begins.
This projects focus was allowing new users to join Discord calls without any registration.
Testing Insights
Discord already had a guest invite feature but it was limited to existing users (account creation required) and gave access to a complete server, not a singular call / channel.
Working with my engineers we shipped an experiment to move the "Grant temporary membership" toggle from it's hidden state (above) to being a prominent toggled that was on by default (below).
My goal with this experiment was to see if users were comfortable with any type of guest user in their server and if they would leave the toggle on or swap it to off when sending invitations.
Over a week we saw a huge 5140% increase in the usage of guest membership which was mostly expected when shifting a relatively hidden feature to the foreground of our invite flow and defaulting it's state to on. The more impactful stat was seeing a 2.6% increase in engagement after 24 hours in that server, our temporary members are also our most engaged. This signal gave me the confidence to move forward with the larger shifts towards how we handle guest users.
Problem Space
I explored prominent calling platforms like Zoom & Teams to get a better sense of how platforms make it easy to join a call. I found they put the focus on video and ensuring your system was working properly before joining the call.
My approach focused on speed of joining, moving away from a video focused experience (less than 6% of Discord calls involving video) towards voice and capturing your username.
Before moving into visual concepts I mapped out the experience for server members (the inviters) and guests (the invitees). This helped inform the structure and content of the experience as I moved into mockups.
The Solution
There are 3 primary screens in the journey of a user engaging with Guest Invites. Receiving an invitation, participating in that call and claiming their account after the call wraps up.
I leveraged existing components whenever possible, bringing together pieces from our registration flows, server detail pages and unique holiday celebration experiences.
Some components, such as the voice tester, were built from scratch but with this approach my squad was able to get from idea to shipping in ~2 weeks. Including the time spent on our initial experiment.
Receiving an invitation
Focus is on quickly joining
Ability to personalize name
View audio input to confirm it’s working properly
View details about the room user is joining
Highlighting user status
Clear text identifier of guest users
Nag bar prompting users to claim their account (and username)
Can chat in specific channel text in voice
Claim your account
Minimal requirements to quickly claim account
Closing modal lets users discover different popular Discord communities
Rating your Discord experience is after, not before claiming account