71–80 of 189 posts
> It boggles my mind that a redesign could be implemented so poorly on such a popular site. It's not the first one really. I can count many products that i use daily and have gone down the drain. There is obviously some "change for the sake of change" or just to get a promotion here. Reddit, Skype, adsense off top of my head
I moderate one of the "default" subreddits so I have a rarer perspective than most. I can see the traffic of a subreddit that most users see daily. There are almost 3 times more people using the redesign and the official reddit app together than the old site. However, engagement (number of page views per unique IP) is half or less of the old desktop or third party app. So the new styles (cards, content focused) have…
I am confused at what you mean by engagement.
Is that three times more users by unique ip?
Overall, are their more unique users or less?
The new design is godawful and unusable, especially without JavaScript. Switching to old.reddit.com is a breath of fresh air. The juxtaposition seems like an ideal case study in how bad modern web design is. I swear it's almost like web designers are trying to make things worse.
It’s not the designers’ fault, it’s developers seeing everything as a technology problem rather than a user needs problem (and I’m speaking as a developer). The best solution for any given problem is usually the simplest, at least until you find that you specifically need extra complexity to solve a user need. Unfortunately modern client-side development is fixed in a mindset of developer efficiency above all, which…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not the designers’ fault, it’s developers seeing everything as a technology problem rather than a user needs problem (and I’m speaking as a developer). The best solution for any given problem is usually the simplest, at least until you find that you specifically need extra complexity to solve a user need. Unfortunately modern client-side development is fixed in a mindset of developer efficiency above all, which…
Even as a tech problem, the new UI puts less information on the screen and makes it harder to interact with. It's worse by every observable metric, and I can't imagine they have successful A/B testing, because every other site on the internet that does a redesign (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube) commits to it, and Reddit has allowed users to stay on old reddit for like a year now. The weirdest thing is that successful al…
Despite popular belief, A/B testing doesn't actually work for usability testing. So successful A/B testing usually means bad usability practices.
I moderate one of the "default" subreddits so I have a rarer perspective than most. I can see the traffic of a subreddit that most users see daily. There are almost 3 times more people using the redesign and the official reddit app together than the old site. However, engagement (number of page views per unique IP) is half or less of the old desktop or third party app. So the new styles (cards, content focused) have…
I would expect that only the most engaged users would be using old desktop or third party app, since those are much harder to find and require much more effort (such as digging through settings, or investigating other app options). The less engaged, casual users would be using the default options (new web or default mobile app) because they're much easier to find.
Therefore I propose the causation goes the opposite direction of what you're suggesting: it's not that old web/3rd party app cause users to be more engaged, but rather that being highly engaged causes users to use old web/3rd party app.
The new design is godawful and unusable, especially without JavaScript. Switching to old.reddit.com is a breath of fresh air. The juxtaposition seems like an ideal case study in how bad modern web design is. I swear it's almost like web designers are trying to make things worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not the designers’ fault, it’s developers seeing everything as a technology problem rather than a user needs problem (and I’m speaking as a developer). The best solution for any given problem is usually the simplest, at least until you find that you specifically need extra complexity to solve a user need. Unfortunately modern client-side development is fixed in a mindset of developer efficiency above all, which…
I don't think it has anything to do with developer efficiency. My impression is that client-side development is seen by developers as sort of an unimportant throwaway specialization. Nobody cares about it or bothers to learn any of it even to be able to produce something of quality. First thing people stumble upon is the thing they decide to learn, which almost always means popular javascript framework of the month o…
Or, the put it another way, full stack is a reformulation of jack-of-all-trades.
Unless I missed someone, every single comment (including myself) agrees: the new site is just unusable. It’s awful. IMHO it’s been broken since they released it and so it makes me think that they won’t fix it so people will switch to the app (or that’s what they might be thinking). Like many others I use the old design and if they get rid of it then I’ll just skip Reddit entirely.
I use old.reddit.com out of habit, but don't really care when I land on the new UI. I just use it. People blow it way out of proportion.
I like some of its features, like how it's now a modal over the infinite scroll. I don't have to open everything in a new tab anymore in fear of losing my place in the scroll or having that "sorry, no more pages, start over" message.
I really don't see much worth fuming over. The Digg redesign basically turned it into a weird news site e-zine. Meanwhile the Reddit redesign has the exact same spirit as the old one.
It's unbearable. Reddit's dev and design staff is not very competent. They probably have lots of virtues, being good at their job is not one of them.