The weirdest thing is that successful alternative reddit UIs exist, so all they would have to do is incorporate the features people are using alternative UIs for. They did virtually the opposite of that. This is exactly what Digg did, and the solution for Digg wasn't "allow people to use old Digg", it was "Everyone left and went to reddit".
Despite popular belief, A/B testing doesn't actually work for usability testing. So successful A/B testing usually means bad usability practices.
To be clear, I'm not contesting the value of usability tests involving watching actual users. Our UX team does this with every release and it's invaluable. But I would think data from A/B testing would only help inform our decisions.
Yes, but in a big company developers don't define the product, (product) designers do.
Developers who express their free will strongly risk getting fired. It pays to keep their mouth shut and let the firm torpedo itself.
If we are talking about poor interaction design patterns and unintuitive conceptual models with no prior usability testing/UX research then designers/researchers deserve the blame (assuming devs didn't botch the implementation and create usability problems), but this isn't the issue at hand... platform stability is and that's the job of the developers who code it.
Insane how they had managed to mess it up so badly. I can't comprehend how anyone from any part of Reddit, outside of the marketing department, would spend some time on the redesign and say "nice!"
an example: filtering a large table of data on multiple fields in an otherwise fully-server-rendered project. doing it server-side is likely mostly sql queries using existing stack and re-rendering the page after some “submit” click.
doing it client side means the data can react immediately to selections and never require a full page refresh (which might be costly, depending on the rest of the page). the dev downside is that this might require an enormous amount of new stack and complexity.
Or, the put it another way, full stack is a reformulation of jack-of-all-trades.
https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-i-love-ugly-messy-interfaces-...
i liked the old reddit BECAUSE it was a simple list of links that all behaved exactly as a link should when i click it, and didnt attempt to put visual flair over usability.
You forgot to mention that they load progressively and you never know when the page layout is done and stable, so when you think you click on something, your click ends up being received by a button/link which popped up in between, and there we go, launching a new page or performing an unwanted action, and then going back to the previous page (well, you've got to find the way to go back, because of course it may or may not obey the standard "previous page" command, or it may or may not be a one-page app with a specific way of going back [a cross, a link, a button, ...] placed in a specific place [upper right corner, upper left, bottom row, bottom left corner, bottom right, in a window, in the full page space, etc.]), and waiting for the original page to reload completely one more time...
Focus shifted from building userbase and sustaining business to milking ad revenue.
Same way as LinkedIn, I barely use it to reply to recruiter messages, whenever possible I just prefer to reply it through an e-mail instead of suffering with their slow non-responsive UI.
They are, because the business wants you to download the app.
Bad faith dark design throughout