[maxhallinan]

How does the Aesthetic Usability Effect account for the success of websites like Amazon, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Hacker News, classic Reddit, and LinkedIn, to name a few? There seems to be no correlation between aesthetic quality and use of these sites. I'm not sure what that indicates about the "usability" of these sites. If the goal is to maximize the number of users, it would seem that there is some evidence that a sense of usability determined by aesthetic quality is not that important.

[username223]

I know this will never happen, but it would be interesting to see the percentage of Reddit users who took the time to opt out of the new "improved" interface. I suspect that number is small, because most people have learned to just quietly sigh and accept random UI changes, but larger than the Reddit UI team would care to admit.

[gwern]

If you are a moderator of a reasonably popular subreddit, you can find out by checking the traffic statistics which breaks out old vs new! For example, for my little link-sharing subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/gwern/) : https://imgur.com/a/sUcEQeQ

You can see a large fraction of the users have taken the time to optout, perhaps as much as a third (!) of those who can. Considering how passive most users are, this tells me that the new & expensive Reddit design is indeed loathed.

[plorkyeran]

Reddit tries pretty hard to force you back onto the new design, too. When not using old.reddit.com it "forgets" that I opted out of the redesign on a regular basis, and even old.reddit.com occasionally redirects to the new design.

[gwern]

I think that might be a bug. That was happening to me on a daily or more frequent basis for a while, but I don't think I've had to redo the opt-out in like a week.

[username223]

Thanks! 1/3 opting out is indeed damning. I'm surprised they made those stats public. Hopefully a moderator of /r/programming, /r/news, /r/politics, or some other mega-popular subreddit will post their stats.

[Retra]

People aren't using those sites because of their UIs, but because of the content they offer. UI isn't the only factor, but it is a necessary factor.

[logifail]

> UI isn't the only factor, but it is a necessary factor.

Necessary for what (or for whom)?

[Retra]

A UI is necessary for users to use your product. That doesn't mean the UI is your product.