Digg UI Redesign Part – 2

Another aspect of the UI design that users were attached to was the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. According to TNW’s Alex Wilhelm the new up/down arrows are simply not endearing enough. Worse still, Digg’s less popular competitor Reddit uses arrows, which gives Digg even less reason to incorporate such icons into its new user interface design. Another complaint was the lack of the ‘Upcoming’ news section which lowers “the ability of Digg users to craft the editorial line of the website, in effect neutering the people who tend Digg and give it its character”.

Although the navigation is easier, the default homepage has been changed from ‘Top News’ to ‘My News’. As of writing there is still no way to change that setting. Perhaps with a little time users will come to love the new ‘My News’ page. From a usability perspective, the switch to the Cassandra database management system has been fraught with bugs following massive uptime and reliability problems.  Despite all the protestations Digg’s future, it would seem, is still intact. They have had a number of revolts in the past already. When version 3 of Digg’s user interface design was released they also received a number of complaints from users but over time a lot of the issues were resolved. It will be interesting to see how Digg will react to appease users.