HN Explorer

Ask HN: Any examples of product redesigns that worked?

15 points by smusamashah ↗ HN
This is in context of reddit redesign and how everyone (everyone here at least) hates it. Personally I hate how Microsoft has been ruining windows itself and lots of other actually goose software with unnecessary redesigns (Macification basically) which ends up removing features. I have never used Digg but heard about it's redesign too. So many websites which use to be fast and accessible have been turned into a redesigned modern mess. c2.wiki and imdb and lots of blogs that turned into a single page, slow loading mess.

I don't believe it's just aesthetic usability effect, there has to be some examples and metrics which prove this redesign to be actually useful for products. What are they? What websites are currently in need of a similar redesign such that if they fail in next few years we can all agree that its design caused it?

15 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 20.4 ms ] thread
joeframbach
The Amazon checkout process used to be a series of full page navigations. Changing shipping address - full page navigation. Adding gift card - full page navigation. Pretty painful. Sometime in the past year or two they quietly changed it to a single page app thing. It's like a big accordion where the sections expand and collapse as you go, and that also shows your checkout progress. Normally I prefer full page navigations and I hate the SPAification of the web, except for this.
roflyear
But somehow they made the search bar weird? Like it deselects often. Or is this just me?
bobolino123
What are you buying on Amazon if I may ask? I don't order that much tbh. My wife buys a lot from shein. We also order from ikea or online pharmacy if needed.
sp332
Everybody hates the new Reddit… except they’ve more than doubled their MAU since then, so maybe it’s just a loud minority and everyone else likes it.
Meph504
I doubt you could find any direct metric that attribute new members to that UI change, and it is more likely because of reddit becoming more popular and commonly mentioned in other places.
JCharante
Is everyone forgetting about the early 2010s when people on imgur would call reddit “that confusing site” because most people weren’t familiar with old.reddit.com’s wide and hierarchical structure with different subreddits. Reddit needed to grow as a company with VC funding so they needed to change their target audience to the internet illiterate to keep getting more users and in turn made a UI that all the internet literate people hate but the new users don’t mind. That’s why the information density was severely reduced. You can’t show them too much text or it scares them away.
KerrAvon
They could have reduced the info density and still not made it completely unusable, though. The implémention is the problem — it’s a labyrinth of barely functional JavaScript.
breckenedge
Interesting. I maintain a forum (~50k visitors/day) and have been quietly, slowly turning up the information density on the site by reducing font size, padding, etc. Most of our users are 30-50 years old.

Now they see about 25% more than they did before before on a mobile screen. Hasn't had any impact on traffic, but I like it.

The designers either haven’t noticed or don’t care.

Is there a reason most designers go with 16px/1rem as the default font size? Feels comically large to me.

troad
> The designers either haven’t noticed or don’t care.

You seem to be discounting the possibility that you’re subtly degrading their experience, sufficiently slowly that they’ve yet to revolt en masse. The blind spot of A/B testing is slowly building resentment for a slowly degrading product. I couldn’t tell you every single specific way that in which Duolingo has slowly become terrible over the years, but I can tell you I am no longer a paying subscriber.

> Feels comically large to me.

I browse the Internet at between a 125 and 200 percent zoom, so I guess it feels comically small to me. I don’t understand why I should strain my eyes to “fit more content in” - scrolling is free, and I can only read one thing at a time anyway.

deanCommie
Honestly, MOST redesigns.

Almost every website that is in any way successful from Airbnb to Uber to Facebook to Google Maps has gone through dozens of redesigns, and each time the site grew and grew and grew.

(And most of the time the users, including on here, complained endlessly)

throw9away6
Because the kpi for redesign often are user hostile for increased ad performance or added bloat
nailer
Twttr, the green slime app that eventually became Twitter?