Any examples of product redesigns that worked?
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?
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)
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.
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.
Twttr, the green slime app that eventually became Twitter?
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.