Strategic UX & Interaction Design Project: Reddit redesign

Rethinking the Reddit browsing experience for its community

This project was an independent design exercise following a typical UX research and design process including competitive analysis, user research, creating personas, a strategic UX plan, and basic interaction design. It’s not intended to be a complete redesign of Reddit, but instead aims to improve shortfalls in the existing browsing experience to better reflect how users actually interact with the site. I also lightly updated the site's visual and interaction design to account for these changes and improve overall usability across different platforms. 

Please note that all of the wireframes shown for this project are low fidelity and their visual design should not be considered anywhere near final. Their purpose is to convey the key features that I added and changes I made in a way that could be further developed into higher fidelity wireframes and working prototypes.

Strategic UX

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS:

I started with a competitive analysis of similar sites offering content aggregation and user-generated content to understand how their users were finding, consuming, and creating content and to identify opportunities for improvement in those areas. I also reviewed the analytics of the existing Reddit site to gain an understanding of its current traffic patterns and user demographics.

I found that Reddit had many more unique monthly visitors and a higher global rank than competing content aggregators, but that its visual design and functionality fell (often shockingly) short comparatively. 

USER RESEARCH:

I conducted user research where I interviewed and observed frequent Reddit users in one-on-one sessions. These were conducted both in-person and remotely to understand how users interacted with and thought around the site and observe their browsing habits in both freeform and task based contexts. These were useful not only for understanding how these users were interacting with the site but also enabled me to identify shortcomings that they were encountering in the current browsing experience.

Sample interview question included:

On [days you visit Reddit], how much time do you spend on the site? How many different sessions?

What device(s) do you usually browse Reddit on? Do you use any apps or add-ons?

What other sites do you regularly visit and spend a lot of time on? How much time?

What sort of content are you looking for when you’re using Reddit?

What makes you want to read or not read the comments for a link?

As you were browsing, was there anything you wanted to do but weren’t able to?

insights:

My research showed that users came to Reddit for its community—its comments and user-generated content—as much as for its links to external content like images and articles. All of the users interviewed frequently browsed the site in ways that the existing site design did not account for, with many using inconvenient or awkward workarounds to get to the content they wanted to see in the order they wanted to see it.

Personas:

Personas were created around three core takeaways from user interviews: That Reddit is one of their main sources for “serious” news and professional discussion, that the user-generated content and community is the single biggest draw to the site, and that they’re visiting for quick “bursts” of entertainment throughout their day. These personas were fleshed out with other findings from user research, but the usability improvements and new user flows that I created were mainly driven by these core takeaways.

usability improvements & New user flows

Make comments much more prominent:

The strength of the Reddit community draws heavily from the comments its users leave on videos, images, etc; but the links to view these comments are given short shrift in the current design. Improving the rank of this link in the visual hierarchy for the actions that surround every piece of content greatly improves usability.

Build-in sequences or “flows” for browsing content:

User research revealed that many users would frequently visit a series of subreddits one after the other in a pattern or sequence that they repeated on a regular basis. Many users even went so far as to habitually browse the same subreddits in the same order based on the time of day. This user flow was not captured at all by the existing design, so a “Sequence” browsing mode was created. When selecting “sort by ‘Sequence’” for the first time, users are presented with several automatically generated sequences which can be extensively customized, and are given the opportunity to create their own from scratch.

Create a follow feature for discussions

The discussions that make up the Reddit community are incredibly dynamic as more content is submitted and more users add their voices over time, but there is no built-in way for users to return to discussions they are interested in and easily see what’s new since their last visit. Adding a follow feature enables users to quickly discover what they’ve missed by following discussions in a way that integrates into their regular visits, keeping them up to date no matter what device they’re visiting on and without using awkward, inconvenient workarounds like leaving a browser window open for hours.

Simplify content navigation and discovery

User research revealed that the list of subscribed subreddits that appears across the top of every page is underutilized at best and actively frustrating at worst because it constantly changes without any user input in a seemingly opaque way. Enabling users to customize this space by “pinning” and arranging the subreddits of their choice makes it much more useful and creates a much more consistent experience.

CONCLUSION

By updating key elements of the site and adding new user-flows that strongly improve on the shortcomings in existing interaction patterns, the Reddit browsing experience is enhanced without disrupting elements that currently make it successful. 

Obviously this project is nowhere near “finalized” – further steps would be additional rounds of user testing to validate the design decisions made and determine if they are intuitive and useful. This would be followed by additional design iterations based on those testing results, higher fidelity wireframes, and working prototypes.