Reddit announced last year that it was undertaking its first major redesign in over a decade. According to Reddit’s CEO and co-founder, Steven Huffman, there was a variety of goals that had been attached to the project. The chief goal was to decrease the bounce rate of first-time visitors and lift the amount of time everyone spent on the website.
“Reddit grows primarily through word of mouth. Many of us evangelize Reddit and tell people how awesome it is, what an impact it’s made in their life, how much it makes them laugh, etc., and then when those new people decide to check out Reddit for the first time they’re greeted with dystopian Craigslist. We’d like to fix that,” wrote Hoffman in a November 2017 AMA thread.
After over a year and a half of research, testing and user input, Reddt started to roll out its new site in April of this year. Zubair Jandali, the company’s VP of brand partnerships said Reddit is seeing three to seven times better user engagement rates with the redesign compared to the classic version.