Digg UI Redesign Part – 1

Digg, the social news-aggregation and recommendation site, recently re-launched as version 4.0 to a storm of controversy coming from a significant number of long-term users. Reworking and relaunching a website with a new user interface design is a delicate matter. Usually the goal behind such an overhaul of the UI design is to make it more attractive and easy to use for the website’s users. Often, changes are done iteratively to optimize the GUI. When done right consensus should be that the new interface design is a marked improvement and should lead to an uptake by new users. The fourth iteration of Digg’s user interface design takes a cue from Twitter and Facebook, something a number of social networks seem to be doing more and more of.  And with good reason too! The popularity of both websites cannot be put down to a mere fluke. These two websites are busy setting the pace as far as conventions on social networks go.

The revolt against the new interface design has already claimed casualties as Digg’s VP of engineering was fired. The biggest gripe users have with the new Digg, in terms of user interface design, is the lack of the ‘bury’ button. Now users can only ‘like’ a news story but cannot ‘bury’ it to make the news story less popular. The reasoning behind the lesion of the ‘bury’ button is that users abused the feature. Now users have the option to either report a story, should they find it offensive, or they can ‘hide’ a story. ‘Diggers’ became attached to the bury button and as such removing it was bound to backfire.