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> Their downfall is thinking they actually knew what they were doing and therein lies their problem. I read an interview with the PlentyOfFish founder and he a

> Their downfall is thinking they actually knew what they were doing and therein lies their problem. I read an interview with the PlentyOfFish founder and he alluded to this. People would ask him why his site looked so bad compared to other dating sites. He said he he was afraid trying to make it better would make it worse. In reality he didn't know why people liked his site so much but it was working. So he ended up working a couple hours each morning checking for spam and paying bills and took the rest of the day off instead of trying to constantly "improve" the site.

somehnguy 7y ago
The lack of wanting to improve the site really shows. Of all the dating sites I've tried POF is by far the worst, nearly ever user I've had contact with was a spam bot. It's totally useless.
nojvek 7y ago
Digg looked great. Even original digg looked way nicer than current reddit. The problem was big redesign. They really fucked it up. Ads were being shoved left and right without knowing what really was an ad and what wasn’t. It’s the same fuckery reddit started doing and scaled a bit back. I still hate current reddit (all the pop ups are really annoying) Moral of the story: don’t do massive redesigns. Listen to your customers (not your VCs). Change one small thing at a time, A/B test it, UX interview it with customers, then roll it more % of customers. if no red flags, increase % over time to 100%.
- OGWhales 7y ago
  Oh man, I really dislike the new reddit. It's slower and wastes half the screen real estate. Why did they think it was good? Seriously a bummer, as you know the old design is gonna be phased out at one point or another.
- j-james 7y ago
  The classic example of a redesign done right is with eBay. eBay's background used to be a (very) bright yellow, which looked pretty bad even for the web in 2009. When they initially changed it to the current white, the designers received enough complaints to change it back for fear of loosing parts of their userbase. They still wanted to change the background to pave the way for other websites, so slowly, over several months, they lightened the shade of yellow until it became white. [a] This concept has been applied by many other "big" websites - Amazon, Dell, Google, and Yahoo come up as examples. [b] [a]: https://theuxblog.com/blog/redesigning-user-experience https://theuxblog.com/blog/redesigning-user-experience [b]: https://articles.uie.com/death_of_relaunch/ https://articles.uie.com/death_of_relaunch/
  - sys_64738 7y ago
    It seems like any time a company backtracks on a design decision that they simply didn’t do their research thoroughly, if at all. All too often web pages look and feel is left to the software people who make terrible changes. Companies fail to realize that the webpage is their customers’ window to their business. Why would you leave that in the hands of coders?

somehnguy 7y ago

The lack of wanting to improve the site really shows. Of all the dating sites I've tried POF is by far the worst, nearly ever user I've had contact with was a spam bot. It's totally useless.

nojvek 7y ago

Digg looked great. Even original digg looked way nicer than current reddit. The problem was big redesign. They really fucked it up. Ads were being shoved left and right without knowing what really was an ad and what wasn’t. It’s the same fuckery reddit started doing and scaled a bit back. I still hate current reddit (all the pop ups are really annoying) Moral of the story: don’t do massive redesigns. Listen to your customers (not your VCs). Change one small thing at a time, A/B test it, UX interview it with customers, then roll it more % of customers. if no red flags, increase % over time to 100%.

OGWhales 7y ago
Oh man, I really dislike the new reddit. It's slower and wastes half the screen real estate. Why did they think it was good? Seriously a bummer, as you know the old design is gonna be phased out at one point or another.
j-james 7y ago
The classic example of a redesign done right is with eBay. eBay's background used to be a (very) bright yellow, which looked pretty bad even for the web in 2009. When they initially changed it to the current white, the designers received enough complaints to change it back for fear of loosing parts of their userbase. They still wanted to change the background to pave the way for other websites, so slowly, over several months, they lightened the shade of yellow until it became white. [a] This concept has been applied by many other "big" websites - Amazon, Dell, Google, and Yahoo come up as examples. [b] [a]: https://theuxblog.com/blog/redesigning-user-experience https://theuxblog.com/blog/redesigning-user-experience [b]: https://articles.uie.com/death_of_relaunch/ https://articles.uie.com/death_of_relaunch/
- sys_64738 7y ago
  It seems like any time a company backtracks on a design decision that they simply didn’t do their research thoroughly, if at all. All too often web pages look and feel is left to the software people who make terrible changes. Companies fail to realize that the webpage is their customers’ window to their business. Why would you leave that in the hands of coders?