Redesigning the Redesign of Reddit | Hacker News Reader

Redesigning the Redesign of Reddit

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9 pointskrm0114 comments

Their re-re-design is a slight improvement but much of my issue with the Reddit re-design isn't simply the initial layout (although the excess whitespace is irksome) it is many things:

- Slow / high CPU usage

- Comments don't /really/ open. Instead it is this strange modal-like experience with these "suicide" dark bars at either side that redirects you to that subreddit or the reddit homepage losing your position on the comments.

- Tons of whitespace everywhere.

- Infinite scroll

- More visual distractions ("Trending today", larger image ads, more embedded ads, the footer is now on the right instead of bottom, etc).

- Too much emphasis on stuff that isn't important. Content should be king but they list "r/AskReddit •Posted XXXYYYY 12 hours ago" first so you have to visually skim passed it, annoying Join button (which is a solution to a non-problem), and a comments button that does the same thing as just clicking the title (rather than taking you to the actual content).

I could go on.

Totally agree on it being slow. Displaying a list of links should not be slow. Too many design and dev teams try to make these interactive JS apps in the browser that are terribly slow and anti-user.

I’ll stop using Reddit when they inevitably remove old.reddit.com

I made the same decision the other day. The redesign is such a pain to use that it's absolutely unbearable.

> Don’t turn redesigns into a revolution that alienates your core users

I've been a heavy Reddit user for 7 years (still am) and alienated is exactly how I feel about the desktop redesign. I rarely use Reddit on mobile, I'd say 99% of the time I use it via the desktop interface with RES.

It's like a different company took over a product they didn't understand, completely lacking skills to accomplish their goals. It's wrong on a design level, on a UX level, and on a technical level.

I absolutely love using Reddit and I've even considered making my own UI and feed it via their public API.

I currently use a plugin to redirect to old.reddit.com[1] and I think I read somewhere that reddit does not plan to shut that down any time soon.

[1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

If you are logged in there is a setting to use old Reddit. When the redesign was launched it wasn't very consistent, but it has been working fine for the past couple of months.

The redesign of the redesign isn't bad, but it needs more contrast. The light grey on the white background is too hard to read and the light grey borders around key elements do nothing to separate them out visually.

Is this a new design trend? I'm seeing the lack of contrast on a site being seen more and more as "subtle" as if that were a good thing.

Compact != cluttered

I like things dense for better use of monitor space, be it Gmail or Reddit. All that dead space is wasted space, minimalism or not.

Removing the preview button will probably hurt functionality. Also if you're going to make things bigger anyway I'd make the thumbnails bigger as well (not that it will matter much for the text-based subreddit).

Also changing the upvote / downvote arrows won't help adoption, even the redesign didn't dare do that.

This approach is from a designer perspective and not an engagement/user retention perspective.

you say that like it's a bad thing.

trying to game user engagement/user retention numbers are what get you things like notification requests when you visit random websites (I'm looking at you, website for arbitrary midwest nbc affiliate).

I posit that the "stickiness" factor of website is a bad measure of how "good" its design is.

Looks a lot like the classic view, with more minimalism and whitespace. And lacking the sidebar.

Can't you overcome this "problem" by simply changing the view?

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