We launched Activities to the public on Discord! It's been such a fun ride working on this product for the past year with so many great people. If you’ve ever stayed up way too late playing games and watching videos with people in Voice…well, you’re probably about to again. Now announcing Activities: a way to enjoy shared experiences with friends, such as games and media.

Platform ⚙️

Working n the platform side of things meant figuring out how Activities would work inside of Discord, specifically inside of Voice. We wanted to make sure Activities were properly displayed outside of voice channels as well. Activities are shown inside the voice channel by way of the grid view and focused view. Outside of voice channels Activities are displayed in the channel list sidebar, the RTC panel, in rich presence on profiles and in the Active Now panels.

The Activity Shelf 📚

This is our main entry point for activities so we spent a lot of time making sure it was easy to use, informative and inviting. We built dynamic cards that feature videos that play on hover, category tags that act as quick descriptors and callouts for max participant limits. We built this with scalability in mind so we can easily add things like search and filters later on when we have a larger selection of titles in the shelf.

Mobile

We designed the Activities platform for Voice at the same time that our redesigned app was rolling out so we worked closely with that team to make sure Activities fit the new design system and visual style of the new app.

Activities 🚀

I got to collaborate with our Activities Studio team to help design a couple of new activities. The first was Watch Together, allowing people to watch YouTube videos in Voice Channels. I worked closely with our Activities Studio and YouTube on this experience.

I also got to do a bit of UX and interaction design on a game called What Do You Meme, launching in January. Shout out to everyone on the studio team, especially Elie for all of the incredible art and animation and Hamza and Zoe for building this incredible fun little game. Here's a sneak peak:

Also, I got to put my motion design skills to use and made this NUX video to educate users in-product when they gain access to Activities. We used this video during experiment and in the public release.

Thanks for viewing ❤️

It's been incredible seeing the work the team put into this and all of the fun experiences they have built around it. I cannot wait to see how this evolves and ecstatic to see what external developers will build with it.

Interested in building more immersive experiences where users can instantly play, listen, watch, or learn together? 👉 https://discord.com/build