For years now, Reddit has looked pretty much the same and has barely changed at all since it introduced subreddits back in 2008. It appears that the company has finally rolling out its first major redesign in a long time, though it’s only available to one percent of the website’s population and will become available to more people in the coming months.
Over the past year, Reddit has been working on a redesign where it made sure to not go away from what made it unique, all the while offering a better experience to navigate and ease of use.
Wired reports that two people from the Reddit team for the project surveyed random people at San Francisco’s Union Square. In the survey, the two researchers asked whether they understand how the website works and found that while many people understood the concept behind Reddit, they couldn’t really figure out how to use it or what to use it for. This was something Reddit looked to fix to truly become “the front page of the internet.”
After getting feedback, the team came up with three views to choose from: a Lassic layout that looks similar to the current Reddit with a few design tweaks, a Card layout which can be seen above where it puts each post in its own card, and lastly, the Compact view that brings posts more closer together so it’s easier to scroll through everything.
Do you have the choice to choose your own view? Of course you do. You can switch between the three views with a toggle option. When you click a post, it will open a light box without taking you away from the page you’re on. In addition, you’re getting new fonts, clearer distinction between internal links that go to Reddit posts and external links, a more prominent button for creating new posts, and a new version of Reddit mascot Snoo.
Speaking to Wired, Ben Rush, the team’s user interface design lead, said that they’re “making [Reddit] simpler and more efficient, making it more accessible, but not altering the scaffolding.” If you’re not interested in using the new redesign and still prefer the old one, don’t worry, you can still use the old interface.
Here’s a preview of the Classic redesign:
Here’s a preview of the Compact redesign:
