Helping users find and play games with Discord Lobbies—a native discovery and game session creator.
Project Details
Product Designer
Discord, Feature concept
July 2025 (4 weeks)
SUPERVIVE
Jump, glide, shoot, pun...
Context
The concept of this project originated from my observations of friction with Discord's player experience. My deep curiosity with product design innovation and player experiences drove me to consider solutions to this problem.
Problem: Coordinating Discord game sessions is slow and manual
Without a Discord-native way to streamline this frequent behavior, player experience is poor, and reliance on competitor platforms increases. HMW help players quickly and confidently coordinate game sessions in Discord?
Existing Flow: A single, overwhelming screen with unclear steps.
Objectives
Improve the player experience and strengthen Discord’s platform role by:
Reducing coordination time from minutes to seconds
Keeping session discovery inside Discord
Enabling studios to measure discovery and conversion
Solution: Lobbies turn chats into instant games sessions
Through user research, testing, and iteration, I designed a feature that enables players to create and launch Lobbies in a DM or server. Allowing friends to join the same in-game session in one-click.
Key elements of the solution:
Frictionless setup: Lobby creation from the Apps menu.
Seamless invites: Share to a DM, group, or server with a clear “Join Lobby” CTA.
Instant launch: Friends join a pre-made lobby in the game, eliminating multi-step setup.
Native discovery: Lobby cards double as lightweight game promotion, surfacing partner titles in relevant chats.
Lobbies creation flow: Streamlined so players can spin up a lobby anywhere and get friends playing instantly.
Lobbies traffic drives gameplay conversions, displayed in studio analytics dashboard
Lobbies in DMs: Provide an easy, persistent way for friends to re-engage and play again.
Projected Impact
90%
task improvement
Coordination time cut from 5+ minutes to under 30 seconds, validated through surveys, user testing, and simulated sessions.
Higher
platform retention
Players stay in Discord to discover games at their moment of highest intent, instead of turning to other platforms.
Expanded
game discovery
Elevated featured game titles in the Apps menu, increasing visibility and engagement with partner titles where players already explore.
Increased
conversion tracking
Measurable funnel from impressions → lobby joins → in-game sessions to bolster platform partnership ROI for developers.
Research
I interviewed and surveyed Discord users, and conducted secondary research to uncover pain points within the player experience. This discovery revealed opportunities to improve not only the player experience, but also the developer experience to strengthen Discord’s position as a preferred developer platform.
Key insights:
83% of users experience over 10 minute game session coordination times
67% have abandoned game session due to complexity
Players are discovering games to play on competing platforms
Game studio developers are looking for more distribution, discovery, and analytics
Mixed-Methods Research: User Interviews, Player Experience Survey, and Secondary Research.
Define
After synthesizing my discovery findings into problem and how might we statements, I ran an ideation workshop to brainstorm relevant and effective solutions.
Mixed-Methods Research: Need-Finding Interviews, Player Experience Survey, and Secondary Research.
Define
After synthesizing my discovery findings into problem and how might we statements, I ran an ideation workshop to brainstorm relevant and effective solutions.
Mixed-Methods Research: Need-Finding Interviews, Player Experience Survey, and Secondary Research.
User flow
I mapped a player's journey through the leading solutions from ideation, identifying the most seamless pathway from conversation to gameplay: Lobbies, one-click game lobbies that launch friends into a game session directly from a Discord chat.
User flow diagram of the existing flow.
Wireframe
I created wireframes based on the steps of the Lobbies flow. First, I explored
Wireframes
User Testing
I drafted a testing plan and conducted user tests with 5 users to understand how they interacted with these designs and if the solution truly resonated.
A few learnings were:
Modal-based invitation system felt disruptive. I iterated to a simpler interaction that preserved existing patterns in the Apps menu.
Users struggled with complex lobby cards. I simplified to clean tile designs with prominent "Join Lobby" CTAs, to clarify the interaction.
Overall, users expressed interest in using Lobbies regularly, validating that Lobbies was solving for a real user need.
One tester noted, "You have no idea how long my friends and I have been waiting for something like this"
User testing brief and script
Early iterations exploring varying interaction and visual treatments
Final Designs
I delivered high-fidelity design specs, partnered with engineering for feasibility checks, and collaborated with QA to validate parity with designs before release.
Final designs
