[jo_]

I'm guilty of abhorring UI changes. Very rarely do I see them as justified. I largely prefer incremental UI changes rather than grand overhauls. The latter seems to be a minimal increase in functionality and a maximal increase in glitz.

I think Reddit has been taking the incremental approach, especially when it comes to rolling functionality into the main engine from all the (now less useful) browser plugins.

That said, there's still a question that remains. Is the UI a mess? Maybe? Yes? I'm not sure. I'm so familiar with it at this point that I can't tell what's wrong with it. Most of the operations I care about are readily available. What, in particular, could use improvement?

[PavlovsCat]

Personally, I feel it could be a bit more tabulated or lined up, if that makes sense? One tiny thing would be to change "submitted 10 hours ago by $username to $subreddit" to "$subreddit - 10 hours - $username", which I would argue is less "glitz", it's slightly less informative for newcomers to the site, but friendlier on the eye for repeated use, at least for me.

I'd also some subtle visual cues to separate posts from each other. I know it's not modern, but I still like the look of forums; lots of little boxes to me actually feel less cluttered than lots of little boxes with no clear boundary around them. And I feel similarly about HN, which could do with some application of max-width on the comments the very least (if not the "boxes with subtle gradients and tasteful hints of shadows" style I am so fond of)

Some things do help guide the eye, even a subtle gradient for example is a cue where you are scroll wise in a post that is larger than the screen; not that useful, but still not nothing, and I believe such things add up in addition to being friendlier to the eye. It's not about "design" for me, I don't like when that gets in the way of functionality either. Just keeping on iterating and smoothing things out.. I also don't like big overhauls, but I also always thought that while Craigslist proved that websites don't have to be shiny, it wouldn't have hurt it to have been made it a bit nicer over time. There is a lot that can be done without changing the location on the screen of any of the elements, just the looks and the space between them.

But since no userbase that big will ever agree on anything and the default is no change.. maybe give users an easy way to create and share their own styles, and use them on some or all subreddits? Subreddit styles are one thing, a wonderful thing, but I bet you this would spawn a whole new wave of creativity and fresh designs, and who knows, maybe that in turn can give pointers on how to improve the default look (or simply provide several as options). Even as is, there are many subreddits which are perfectly greyish white and decent, but still a lot nicer looking IMHO than the default.

[brianpgordon]

There are a lot of usability issues but the most blatant anachronism in my opinion is having to refresh the entire page to check for orangereds. Long polling has been ubiquitous for a decade, and nowadays everyone is using WebSocket for push.