Citing UX in a thread about Reddit, the company with an almost universally hated redesign that moved away from a mostly text-based condensed format is... interesting.
Same reason why Gmail is a bloated mess, because that's what the metrics show is wanted by users.
Doesn't that just mean that users are spending more time on the site because it's so much more of a pain to get what they actually want out of it? Like, you could increase "user engagement" of a shopping mall by turning it into a labyrinth and rearranging the shops every day.
Also, Protip: in case anyone still doesn’t know, go to old.reddit.com for the previous, better interface. Who knows how long it will be kept alive though.
I'm using an extension to automatically redirect to the old one. When the old site is gone, I will probably leave Reddit, the redesign is too unusable for me.
I like HN but I miss the diversity of conversations. /r/synthesizers /r/starwarssleaks etc.
You don't need megabytes upon megabytes of nonsense just to avoid some full page loads. Or take al ook at something like HN where it's light enough that a full page load isn't a problem.
I don’t think most people know how to handle anything but an infinite scrolling page.
I'm sure they lose some users but they've gained far more than they've lost so far.
I've been on the new design, trying to give it a chance, for over a year trying to give it a chance, and I still have to often switch to old.reddit.com to do some things.
1. The new interface still doesn't have the "other discussions" link to show you discussions of the same link in other subreddits. I think they said something like a year ago that they realized this was important and it was coming soon.
2. The new interface messes up scrolling on Edge on my Surface Pro 4 when viewing a discussion. Actually, for this one you don't have to switch to old.reddit to work around. All you have to do is hit refresh. When you refresh while on a discussion, that switches from the view that shows the discussion in an overlay on top of the thread list, to a more traditional page that just has the discussion. That page doesn't fuck with scrolling. Depending on how much I plan on reading and how long the discussions are, I may or may not get annoyed enough with this to just give up and switch to old.reddit.
(BTW, that discussion as overlay view also fucks up in-page search, because the thread list is still on the page, just hidden from your view--but not the browser's search functions--behind the discussion view, and so the search hits those hidden items).
The only thing I can find in the new interface that is actually functionally better than the old interface is the fancy pants editor. Aside from selecting tools/commands not always always working if it has to put them on the "..." pop-up, and it sometimes losing the ability to scroll the text being edited via the mouse, the new editor is a win.
If they would just put the new editor as an option on old Reddit, I think a lot of people would be happy.
the A/B test isn't telling you that users like something, only that its taking them longer and they didn't bounce.