I can't think of a single popular site redesign that actually made the site better. They're almost inevitably worse, usually much worse.
A common failing is trying to make the design more shiny and pretty while decreasing functionality, dumbing the site down, adding bloat, and slowing the site down to a crawl.
I really hope Reddit does not go down this road, because they really have a good thing going now. It would be a real shame to ruin it.
> I can't think of a single popular site redesign that actually made the site better.
Depends on your definition of "better".
Facebook has done several redesigns that the audience has groaned about and here we are 1 billion users later. TechCrunch did a large redesign several years, and here we are, still reading TC articles. The list goes on and on...
Heh, I knew I'd get dinged for that. As much as I loathe TC myself, it does still get linked here often and the design, while funky at first, hasn't appeared to have had a significant negative impact on them.
So many comments here and not a single mention of "Slashdot Beta". It was a huge disaster, every single article had complaints about it while it was in effect.
They changed owners shortly after and it's still a running joke years later.
Every brand that has a large enough following will run into pitchforks for large redesigns - a lot of people are fans for something.
If you want to do this successfully, take a slice from Facebooks playbook. Their site looks nothing like 10 years ago, yet they somehow did all those radical UI changes gradually over years, always one step at a time, (mostly) listening to their user base inbetween.
> Their site looks nothing like 10 years ago, yet they somehow did all those radical UI changes gradually over years, always one step at a time, (mostly) listening to their user base in between.
I remember being really annoyed at one of the changes in about 2008. Looking at the timeline of Facebook[0], it was probably the rearrangement of the site into tabs (and then into something like the current layout 2 years later). I think that it's telling that I remember being annoyed at the time (and a bunch of other times, after other changes) than I remember what those changes were. Sometimes it's hard to remember exactly what it was like in the early days. So, I went looking and also found a Cnet slideshow illustrating the different looks of the site over the years [1]
>Every brand that has a large enough following will run into pitchforks for large redesigns - a lot of people are fans for something.
That is false, "running into a pitchfork" is the better, and least likely outcome.
Very often things develop like this: user logs in, can't find the usual button, and abandons the website - a la Mozilla forefox redesign fiasco that halved their userbase in a single month.
Another famous case is Akamai - at around 2013 they had a relatively insignifican't redesign, yet a single button was moved. They did not realize that they quietly bled users for over a year until they got serious and researched the matter. They failed to understand that a double digit portion of their users were non-tech staff like marketing boys who were taught to work in a manner like "move mouse over red rectangle, and push the button"
I have no idea why I care about the NFL, but I have been going to profootballtalk.com daily for years. NBC partnered with a bunch of independent sports blogs like PFT a few years ago. They then rolled 'em all out on a new redesign. I stopped visiting after the first couple tries, then PFT backed out of the redesign and went back to their previous (crappy, old) layout. The other blogs I used to go to (pro hockeytalk and pro basketball talk) didn't and I've never returned.
What I like about reddit and HN (more so) is the minimal, fast, low overhead experience. It's like the original slashdot.
I also never get why these sites don't change gradually. I mean, Slashdot tried - their code was a mess, and it looked really old. But it took them ages to rewrite this, and they did it all in one go. Bam! Community was pissed. Why not move the broken old HTML to standard compliant one section at a time, and clean up things here and there, and maybe introduce a new font, or section images, ... instead of this huge explosion_ Sure it might be more work and might also not be completely doable, but if you do it all at once, you are almost guaranteed to alienate your users. And if you are Reddit or Slashdot, that's what makes you.
(I somehow triggered a wrong keyboard layout while typing. I tried to find all typos, but probably didn't get them all)
PFT looks like one of those blogs that is just made up stuff, but it is a pretty good source. I feel like their layout actually harms their credibility though.
> A common failing is trying to make the design more shiny and pretty while decreasing functionality, dumbing the site down, adding bloat, and slowing the site down to a crawl.
If you look at the new reddit profiles beta, you will see that it checks all these boxes.
Apple.com is a marketing site. It's essentially a brochure that is expected to change completely for every new release of the product.
The only major Google Maps redesign was from the original boxy low-fi design to the modern pan & zoom gestural design with overlays. The redesigns after that were mostly incremental and rarely affected the general look and feel of the site. There have been a number of design changes recently to unify it with the mobile app and some would argue those weren't always for the better (much like YouTube where it sometimes feels like the UX is getting worse every time).
Google.com always was fairly minimalist to begin with and that never changed much except for additions like the cards added to the mobile site to bring it in line with Chrome for Android. Again, whether these additions are good or not is heavily disputed.
GMail is yet another case of a site that never underwent a significant redesign but merely iterations on the same look and feel.
I can't say anything on CNN or Uber because I don't frequent them sufficiently to have observed any redesign other than Uber's confused rebranding earlier last year.
The way the new design for Reddit is being described reminds me of the Digg redesign. If you don't remember Digg: Digg was essentially pretty much like Reddit, the biggest differentiator was the community. Digg completely redesigned the site because it was failing hard. Digg today is irrelevant and what little community there was has left before the redesign largely been displaced by the redesign (and refocussing).
Changing aspects of a design that are so strongly part of its look and feel (or it's "DNA" if you insist on being poetical) is extremely risky and extremely easy to do badly. It's especially dangerous if you apparently only do it because you want something new/prettier.
HN and Craigslist don't look ancient because of a lack of effort, they look that way because the designs work and there's not much to be gained from changing it.
Actually, Gmail used to be faster before they added dynamic elements to it. (For slow connections, it still has an option to switch back to the previous design).
I hate it when websites use JavaScript for most of their functionalities. I would always prefer static HTML/CSS pages over shiny, bloated, distracting, non-functional JavaScript-enabled ones.
You can claim anything that you don't dislike is "not redesign", but come on, if adding tabs on top of Gmail was not redesign, I don't know what is. And, just look at gmail now vs. 2004, how can you say it's not redesigned?
Any large, sudden redesign is heavily disputed - that much is obvious, and for good reason, since it changes habits. Maps itself goes through continuous redesign, but each modification is "incremental" as you call it. The end result is fairly drastically changed if you look many years back, but well.... I guess it only had incremental redesign, all along the way.
I guess what I'm saying is that if reddit launches one big-bang "completely new reddit" - yeah, I agree, it's very likely to fail. But if they incrementally change it to something else, and backtrack on the bad decisions - few people will notice the radical change, they'll just remember the many small ones.
The line you quoted does seem to go too far (I'm sure there are some redesigns out there that improved things), but your listed examples really compound it.
Google.com has only ever had tiny tweaks, yet if you read the recent HN comment thread on Instant Search it's enough to show that even these small changes were significant regressions.
Apple.com, as has been mentioned, is a different case.
The rest have pretty categorically disimproved with each iteration. I doubt many would disagree here.
It did evolve, and yes, Google constantly experiments with/ tweaks it, as a matter of fact. I never claimed that sudden radical changes are a good idea - they are very risky, at the very least. And generate dissatisfaction even when done right.
> The rest have pretty categorically disimproved with each iteration. I doubt many would disagree here.
What? That's crazy. Both gmail and google maps have radically improved over their original versions. You're of course free to disagree, since these sorts of things are subjective; but I'm confident that you won't find a majority of users to share that opinion.
> trying to make the design more shiny and pretty while decreasing functionality, dumbing the site down, adding bloat, and slowing the site down to a crawl.
Another good example of this is a car forum called AudiWorld after Internet Brands took it over. Initially, it ran on a super minimalistic forum script that loaded incredibly quickly and worked well for the community. It was certainly ugly yes, but it's what the members liked and had gotten used to.
Then IB came in, converted the whole site to vBulletin on a whim and pretty much killed the community there and then. The members revolted, people left the community in droves and a successor with the old software sprung up immediately to get the refugees from the site. [1]
One poorly thought out move to 'redesign' the site nearly killed a large forum and ended up creating one of its more popular competitors in the process. It's like a mini version of what happened with Digg, except possibly even worse.
It can't be worse than Digg, can it? Just as bad seems like the worst you can realistically get. Digg lost what, 95% or more of its users within months?
Well's there's always the smoking hole in the ground known as Digg. They royally screwed that site up and crashed and burned hard with their redesign. That's how Reddit rose to prominence in the first place.
It's all subjective, of course, but if a Material app starts getting more complex the bare bones nature of the UI actually starts making it more confusing to use in my opinion. Maybe I just haven't used it enough, but every time I look at a Google Cloud Platform console or something it takes me longer than I think it should to find what I'm looking for.
Yes, a thousand times, yes. To me, this is the worst and most offensive redesign of something so pivotal to research, investigative reporting, everything beyond the surface. Being able to dig and dig and find out who is reporting what pieces of the story. I don't CARE if there are 12 articles about the same thing if there are truly 12 different legitimate reports about the event of interest. I want to see all 12 sources in their original place, date stamp, author, etc. The original links are where the real stories hide... not in this curated crap.
Thomas Jefferson said: "Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper." Google already has all the news indexed; why it is choosing to provide less surface area over which to sell its ads is something that makes absolutely no sense.
Company press releases are a gold mine of information. These used to be so prominent in news.google.com; they are completely gone. Multiple pages of results. Gone. All so the already-digested news can belch all over cell phones.
I see it as an attack on our democracy. Basically, censorship. But apparently they don't care.
I found myself laughing the other day when I went to Bing for what I used to use Google news for... because of all the alternatives tested, it seemed to provide the best breadth of what I was looking for.
Redesigns like this make me wish more designers thought in terms of a toggle option for users who don't want the slick and shiny. Seems like such an obvious, idiot-proof solution to pissing off your users en masse.
Material design just doesn't work on desktops. Speed and information density are the way to go, and I'd argue they played no small role in reddit's ascendance.
I'd disagree. I like some of the Material related changes to Google Maps, for example, others seem like they were only done for consistency's sake with no benefit to Google Maps UX. Also IMO they managed to make YouTube even worse with the recent attempts to shoehorn it into their Material design.
The problem with a unified design language is you end up with the lowest common denominator for vastly different products. Material works great for Google Now, somewhat okay for Google Maps, pretty meh for GMail and terribly for YouTube. But that's just, like, my opinion, man.
There's few things in the world I hate more than Google's design. Maybe GoDaddy's control panels. Possibly Ubuntu's installer.
It's absurdly wasteful in terms of space on desktop applications. So many uselessly gigantic buttons with no effort to describe what they do other than an icon.
It tied their apps together, but I don't think it made them easier to use. I feel like I get around in the apps that I use most frequently just by rote. In an unfamiliar app, it's often unclear if something's a touchable option or just a text label. In previous versions, buttons stood out more from the background. I liked that, and I think it was clearer and easier to use.
IMO, the problem is that the kind of people that generally browse this site generally value functionality over looks. Unfortunately, we are a relatively small subset of the population and Reddit is looking to broaden their reach as far as possible. So they are going to make their site more like other social media sites where a big portion of the user base will like it, another portion won't care one way or the other, and a small portion will hate it. I think they know some people will hate the redesign and potentially stop using the site, it's just a small enough portion of the user base that they don't really care.
Luckily for me, I spend > 75% of my time on Reddit on my phone, so it won't really affect me for the most part.
What killed Digg though, wasn't any change in look at feel, as much as a fundamental change in content policy. It went from 'users submit stuff and upvote it' to 'content publishers can automate a firehose of their stories into the system for a price' people didn't like that.
I'm seeing a similar parallel to Reddit's new profiles though. Not exactly the same but it's a move to appease the content publishers that has been angering their core userbase.
The way I remember it, Reddit had pretty much already beat Digg by the time they attempted the redesign and pivot (which largely went hand-in-hand). Those changes were just the final nail in the coffin. But as far as Digg was competing with Reddit, Digg hat already lost.
For me Digg's real problem was that a small cadre of politically active users figured out how to hijack the site and steer it the way they wanted. That's why I left. Reddit did a way better job of sandboxing those people.
I believe Reddit had already surpassed Digg by then. Digg's redesign may have been in part an attempt to respond to reddit's rise, rather than creating it.
Reddit was growing, but the Digg exodus gave it a significant boost. I don't know if Reddit was larger than Digg at that time, but even if it was, a near-doubling in users is a pretty big jump.
I'd say Facebook has done a decent job with redesigns, given the new features they roll out to such a huge user base. The advent of the timeline in 2011, and then the single-column simplification a couple years later, seemed to me to be pretty successful https://www.dailydot.com/debug/old-facebook-profiles-news-fe...
From a market, not engineering pov: It's easy and effective to iteratively improve a website, to suit its present users. But once you've got most of that type of user, you're approaching a local maxima, and your growth slows.
When you want to grow beyond that, you have to appeal to a larger, broader, different segment - though hopefully a superset, not (too) disjoint.
For me, reddit is much less interesting than it used to be (HN also). Perhaps, if they alter it to become more like it was? e.g. subreddits partially achieved this.
Youtube is horrible more so than ever before. The recommended videos is completely broken, it keeps recommending the same videos, and half of them are not relevant to what I'm watching. It's been like this for years.
If I watch a single video from any kind of niche genre, suddenly half the recommended videos for every video are from that genre. I watched one of those helmet cam videos from a cyclist today, now youtube seems to think I'm infatuated with them. It has become slower and more bloated every time they redesign it as well.
I got the opposite impression. It got better. If I watch something I usually don't, it seems like recommendations on the topic at hand are temporary and go away after not much long. Video player is superb now as well. JKL keys still work, buffering got way better and it just works - compare it to abomination of vimeo's player, for example (that crap is just broken).
I agree the recommendations is too moody, but it has nothing to do with any redesigns per se. The same backends feed recommendations independent of what the web page or mobile clients looks like.
YouTube is a pretty trivial piece of work compared to Reddit. Nobody would lose a moment's sleep if YouTube's comment system were radically revised, and few would complain if it went away entirely. On Reddit, the comment system is everything.
The integration complaints had absolutely nothing to do with design aesthetics. There were some serious privacy concerns that arose when Google unified YouTube accounts with accounts used for other Google services.
The New York Times had a major redesign earlier this year or last year, and it's as incredible. MUCH improved, way better comments, lovely UI, and loads quickly on many devices.
A common failing is trying to make the design more shiny and pretty while decreasing functionality, dumbing the site down, adding bloat, and slowing the site down to a crawl.
I really hope Reddit does not go down this road, because they really have a good thing going now. It would be a real shame to ruin it.