Team: reddit
Role: UX Designer
Timeline: November 2024 - Current
Reddit has 100 Million Daily Active Users (DAU) visiting their app in search of news, creative content, and community. Initially a link aggregator and text forum, much of Reddit's current design has remain unchanged for 15+ years, resulting in a product that looks dated and difficult to parse.
Beyond text and links, Reddit has grown to support photo galleries, videos, live community chats, and more. The larger the breadth of content, the wider a cast of users will be attracted to Reddit. Maintaining user interest in Reddit can be helped by a redesign of the app.
Redesign the Reddit app to place greater emphasis on content and improve scanability of that content. We will conduct a user sentiment study on modernity to determine if Reddit users find the refreshed designs to be more modern, simple, and easier to use while still being informative.
Pre-Research
In order to design a more impactful Reddit experience, we need to know what factors influence a user's perception of the app. We posted a survey on four different subreddits where users provided short-form responses on how they would improve Reddit. Using NotebookLM, we were able to condense the feedback of 47 responses into 4 core themes.
Modern
Design is consistent and pleasing to look at.
Simple
Content and information is quickly parsable.
Easy
Navigation and interaction is responsive and predictable.
Informational
High density of written and visual content.
Baseline Sentiment
Using the core themes from the pre-research, we recruited 10 participants from four subreddits to rate various screens in reddit and their interactions on those screens. We used a 5-point Likert scale and averaged the response of all participants. Afterwards, participants were presented with updated designs of those some screens and asked to re-score.
10
Participants
27
Average Age
4.8hrs
Average Time on App/Week
Current Reddit Design
Participants reported that Reddit has many CTAs, blocks of text, and difficult to discern containers. They also say that much of the app looks the same and does little to inspire discovery.
Redesign Plan
A modern Reddit that addresses user feedback places a greater emphasis on content in subreddits and posts, critical functions like searching and commenting, and flexibility of how the app can feel and look.
Content
More immersive content for increased scanability.
Simplified
Reorganize information so high level surfaces show what's most important.
Connected
Consistent componentry and animation between connected screens.
Home Page
We reduced the vertical size of the list items while increasing thumbnail size and maintaining the same font size. Additionally, a floating nav bar provides a more immersive feel. Colored upvote/downvote arrows gives posts branding and improves scanability.
Comments
Large comments sections can be difficult to navigate. To combat this, we contained comment threads by the parent comment and increased emphasis of collapse lines to help visualize children comments.
Search
While the search function in reddit is used to make new queries, many users use this to return to their favorite subreddits. We incorporated this functionality into the search screen while preserving trending searches and search history.
Subreddit
There are over 2 million subreddits, most of which are not discernible at a passing glance. We want subreddits to feel premium and unique so we made the header image more immersive and overlayed the the subreddit controls and posts above it.
Immersive Mode
Reddit is currently designed with text content as the primary focus. Many posts now, however, featured photos and videos, making it difficult for users who desire this type of content to consume it. Immersive mode makes photo and video content full screen so users can consume it similarly to competing photo and video services.
Managing
Actions beyond content consumption, such as creating posts or reviewing your profile/settings currently take you to other multi-screen flows. To maintain context and reduce degrees of separation from the main app content, secondary actions are displayed in overlays on the screen they are invoked.
Modern Scores
The redesign improved scores in all of our identified themes. Modernity, simplicity, and ease of use saw the biggest jumps in user sentiment, while the increase in informational was much smaller. A follow-up study to identify how users quantify how informational reddit app is necessary to further identify solutions for future iterations.
Looking Ahead
Participants mentioned that they primarily use Reddit on tablets and prefer dark mode theming on their app. Future iterations of user sentiment testing will incorporate larger form factors and different theming to more closely align with users' typical Reddit experiences.
Modernizing Reddit
Milosis