Depends on your definition of "better".
Facebook has done several redesigns that the audience has groaned about and here we are 1 billion users later. TechCrunch did a large redesign several years, and here we are, still reading TC articles. The list goes on and on...
That's debatable (albeit for reasons other than design)
They changed owners shortly after and it's still a running joke years later.
'nuff said.
Every brand that has a large enough following will run into pitchforks for large redesigns - a lot of people are fans for something.
If you want to do this successfully, take a slice from Facebooks playbook. Their site looks nothing like 10 years ago, yet they somehow did all those radical UI changes gradually over years, always one step at a time, (mostly) listening to their user base inbetween.
I remember being really annoyed at one of the changes in about 2008. Looking at the timeline of Facebook[0], it was probably the rearrangement of the site into tabs (and then into something like the current layout 2 years later). I think that it's telling that I remember being annoyed at the time (and a bunch of other times, after other changes) than I remember what those changes were. Sometimes it's hard to remember exactly what it was like in the early days. So, I went looking and also found a Cnet slideshow illustrating the different looks of the site over the years [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Facebook
[1] https://www.cnet.com/pictures/facebook-then-and-now-pictures...
That is false, "running into a pitchfork" is the better, and least likely outcome.
Very often things develop like this: user logs in, can't find the usual button, and abandons the website - a la Mozilla forefox redesign fiasco that halved their userbase in a single month.
Another famous case is Akamai - at around 2013 they had a relatively insignifican't redesign, yet a single button was moved. They did not realize that they quietly bled users for over a year until they got serious and researched the matter. They failed to understand that a double digit portion of their users were non-tech staff like marketing boys who were taught to work in a manner like "move mouse over red rectangle, and push the button"
What I like about reddit and HN (more so) is the minimal, fast, low overhead experience. It's like the original slashdot.
I hate the new animated, ad heavy slow web.
(I somehow triggered a wrong keyboard layout while typing. I tried to find all typos, but probably didn't get them all)
If you look at the new reddit profiles beta, you will see that it checks all these boxes.
Seriously? How about Google.com? Google Maps? Gmail? Apple.com? CNN? Uber? Surely you must believe at least some of those made the site better...
The only major Google Maps redesign was from the original boxy low-fi design to the modern pan & zoom gestural design with overlays. The redesigns after that were mostly incremental and rarely affected the general look and feel of the site. There have been a number of design changes recently to unify it with the mobile app and some would argue those weren't always for the better (much like YouTube where it sometimes feels like the UX is getting worse every time).
Google.com always was fairly minimalist to begin with and that never changed much except for additions like the cards added to the mobile site to bring it in line with Chrome for Android. Again, whether these additions are good or not is heavily disputed.
GMail is yet another case of a site that never underwent a significant redesign but merely iterations on the same look and feel.
I can't say anything on CNN or Uber because I don't frequent them sufficiently to have observed any redesign other than Uber's confused rebranding earlier last year.
The way the new design for Reddit is being described reminds me of the Digg redesign. If you don't remember Digg: Digg was essentially pretty much like Reddit, the biggest differentiator was the community. Digg completely redesigned the site because it was failing hard. Digg today is irrelevant and what little community there was has left before the redesign largely been displaced by the redesign (and refocussing).
Changing aspects of a design that are so strongly part of its look and feel (or it's "DNA" if you insist on being poetical) is extremely risky and extremely easy to do badly. It's especially dangerous if you apparently only do it because you want something new/prettier.
HN and Craigslist don't look ancient because of a lack of effort, they look that way because the designs work and there's not much to be gained from changing it.
I hate it when websites use JavaScript for most of their functionalities. I would always prefer static HTML/CSS pages over shiny, bloated, distracting, non-functional JavaScript-enabled ones.
Any large, sudden redesign is heavily disputed - that much is obvious, and for good reason, since it changes habits. Maps itself goes through continuous redesign, but each modification is "incremental" as you call it. The end result is fairly drastically changed if you look many years back, but well.... I guess it only had incremental redesign, all along the way.
I guess what I'm saying is that if reddit launches one big-bang "completely new reddit" - yeah, I agree, it's very likely to fail. But if they incrementally change it to something else, and backtrack on the bad decisions - few people will notice the radical change, they'll just remember the many small ones.
Reddit going through a redesign will almost certainly create a competitor that people will flock to.
There would have to be something out there that does what Reddit does, and be ready if people bolt.
Google.com has only ever had tiny tweaks, yet if you read the recent HN comment thread on Instant Search it's enough to show that even these small changes were significant regressions.
Apple.com, as has been mentioned, is a different case.
The rest have pretty categorically disimproved with each iteration. I doubt many would disagree here.
It did evolve, and yes, Google constantly experiments with/ tweaks it, as a matter of fact. I never claimed that sudden radical changes are a good idea - they are very risky, at the very least. And generate dissatisfaction even when done right.
> The rest have pretty categorically disimproved with each iteration. I doubt many would disagree here.
What? That's crazy. Both gmail and google maps have radically improved over their original versions. You're of course free to disagree, since these sorts of things are subjective; but I'm confident that you won't find a majority of users to share that opinion.
Another good example of this is a car forum called AudiWorld after Internet Brands took it over. Initially, it ran on a super minimalistic forum script that loaded incredibly quickly and worked well for the community. It was certainly ugly yes, but it's what the members liked and had gotten used to.
Then IB came in, converted the whole site to vBulletin on a whim and pretty much killed the community there and then. The members revolted, people left the community in droves and a successor with the old software sprung up immediately to get the refugees from the site. [1]
One poorly thought out move to 'redesign' the site nearly killed a large forum and ended up creating one of its more popular competitors in the process. It's like a mini version of what happened with Digg, except possibly even worse.
[1] http://8bit.minimal.net/post/87727243/how-to-destroy-a-commu...
Thomas Jefferson said: "Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper." Google already has all the news indexed; why it is choosing to provide less surface area over which to sell its ads is something that makes absolutely no sense.
Company press releases are a gold mine of information. These used to be so prominent in news.google.com; they are completely gone. Multiple pages of results. Gone. All so the already-digested news can belch all over cell phones.
I see it as an attack on our democracy. Basically, censorship. But apparently they don't care.
Redesigns like this make me wish more designers thought in terms of a toggle option for users who don't want the slick and shiny. Seems like such an obvious, idiot-proof solution to pissing off your users en masse.
The problem with a unified design language is you end up with the lowest common denominator for vastly different products. Material works great for Google Now, somewhat okay for Google Maps, pretty meh for GMail and terribly for YouTube. But that's just, like, my opinion, man.
It's absurdly wasteful in terms of space on desktop applications. So many uselessly gigantic buttons with no effort to describe what they do other than an icon.
Luckily for me, I spend > 75% of my time on Reddit on my phone, so it won't really affect me for the most part.
I seriously can't tell what's going on at reddit -- are they embracing their Digg-ness?
Ed:
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/6qptzw/with_...
When you want to grow beyond that, you have to appeal to a larger, broader, different segment - though hopefully a superset, not (too) disjoint.
For me, reddit is much less interesting than it used to be (HN also). Perhaps, if they alter it to become more like it was? e.g. subreddits partially achieved this.
If I watch a single video from any kind of niche genre, suddenly half the recommended videos for every video are from that genre. I watched one of those helmet cam videos from a cyclist today, now youtube seems to think I'm infatuated with them. It has become slower and more bloated every time they redesign it as well.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/11/09/google-plu...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/11/14...
That, and trying to make it behave like more successful (read, profitable) sites, even if the purpose/audience is totally different.
That is, "well if it works for FB it should work for us".
Disclaimer, I have the UID 10 on SoylentNews.
A common failing is trying to make the design more shiny and pretty while decreasing functionality, dumbing the site down, adding bloat, and slowing the site down to a crawl.
I really hope Reddit does not go down this road, because they really have a good thing going now. It would be a real shame to ruin it.