First, thank you for the positive feedback. Despite some issues, I think this is a net-improvement. Some of the feature enhancements we've made are:
- Non-logged-in users can set a language preference by clicking on the language in the upper right.
- Subreddits can be toggled on and off temporarily from the sidebar, and the changes can be made permanent by clicking "save"
- If you click an arrow when you're not logged in, the login cover that pops up takes you to the item you voted on after you log in. Although we can't actually apply the vote for security reasons, this should address the complaint of logging in and losing your place.
- There is a new API for you to use. Although, as I write this I'm finding it broken. More details will come as we get things back online.
Much of the negative feedback we've received was anticipated, so let me address the common complaints we've seen so far:
- If it's not broken don't fix it: it was absolutely broken. When we watch new users come to the site they are more often than not utterly confused. What the site does is not obvious. Most don't see the arrows, the points, or the comments, so we've tried to make this clearer
- The dropdown stinks: this is a thorny issue. The problem we are trying to solve is a lack of horizontal space for navigation. Yes, for a non-logged-in user there is plenty of room for hot/new/top/controversy, but when you tack on saved/recommended and some sort options (which we really wanted to get out of the right-hand area), things get crowded. In the end we opted for consistency and use the dropdown everywhere rather than have it appear and disappear as required. If any of you have other ideas, we'd love to see them.
One major complaint with the dropdown is it's made bouncing between "hot" and "new" more difficult. I agree. For the time being, I put a link to the "new" page outside the menu so the page will be one-click accessible. We have a pretty cool new feature that we'll be getting online after we get through these design changes that will hopefully make this issue moot.
Because the dropdown doesn't work well on some phones, we'll created a simplified mobile interface as well. - The increased vertical space means less content on the front page: Yes, that's true, but it also makes things easier to parse. We'll keep tweaking and see if we can find a happy median.
If you're a professional designer looking for some contract work, now would be a good time to drop a line to jobs@reddit. We'd love help on current design issues as well as assistance on new features.
The beta site runs with its own cache, but against the main reddit database. This means some things will behave strangely. For example, although your votes are always recorded in the database, they may not appear to carry over between the two sites. Comment counts will be off, and your preferences may seem whacky as well.
