Application Design

Reddit Reddesign —
rethinking the "frontpage of the internet"

Opening reddit.com for the first time can be a really frustrating experience. It is hard to find structure in the overload of text, small text and even smaller text. Though it looks like it haven’t changed much since 2005, Reddit is still one of the most visited websites on the internet.

Reddit lives by the activity of millions of users. These users build a strong community which is used to the reddit as it looks and works now. A new design could gain more users but at the same time deter regular users. This gave us the appeal to redesign this website and no other.

User Research

We interviewed/observed several users for this project. With the gained insights we created Personas and User Stories and applied a Kano Analysis to redefine primary, secondary and tertiary functions of reddit. (We also created a subreddit called r/Reddit_Redesign to ask more redditers for their opinion and experiences but unfortunately no one did give a damn.)

Content first

As soon as you break it down you'll recognize: Reddit is all about the content. Structuring the single post - the heart of the page, was the first step. Based on our observations we hide certain functions and created a more understandable hierarchy.

Improved hierarchies and structures then applied to the bigger context (navigation bar, side menus, etc.) created a clearer appearance. Due to the big extent of reddits information architecture we were only able to attack a few of its parts.

Design Systems

Concerning design language we decided to dive into Google's Material Design in order to get a better undertanding for comprehensive design systems which meant not to download UI-Kits from the web but instead to look what it's really made of. We think that you first need to understand the existing in order to change or build something new.

Details

The new favourite Subreddits are now editable via drag 'n' drop inside the navigation bar in order to create a more dynamic usage of them. User want to switch fast between Subreddits. Submitting content did not used to be intuitive and user friendly. We changed that by giving this process more importance, being the first thing the user sees.