Why Digg’s New Features Bother Me
This is the first major Digg interface overhaul that has drastically changed the architecture of the site itself. Digg has moved to a widescreen format for their content. This forces the navigation to the top of the screen. This disoriented me. One of the last things you want to do in unleashing a new UI design is to disorient your users. They become insecure. I can get over the disorientation, but I am going to miss the AJAX disclosure of the sub-categories in the left menu.
They have changed the way that you can view your news chronologically. The interface used to offer a link to yesterday’s top stories. Conceptually, this would make a call to the database that would show you the top stories from yesterday. I will dearly miss this because I often miss out on a day’s top stories because I am at work all day. Now you can only get today’s top stories, this week’s top stories, this month’s top stories, and this year’s top stories.
They have moved videos into their own category of the site. I think this is an important move for them, because videos generally do not fall under the category of news. The way that I used the site before, however, was as a giant repository of media. I would be able to search everything on the site in one fell swoop. Now if I want to search for a video, I have to enter the video portal. I then have to go back to the news portal to search for news. This is an inconvenience to me as it forces me to change my usage habits.
The worst part for me, is that I can no longer search my own profile (my dugg stories). As I mentioned, I use Digg as a link repository. The fact that I can no longer restrict my searches to the things that I have already dugg will severely limit the way I use Digg in the future.
My concerns may very well be invalid. I may just be disoriented with the new interface in a way that I am not sure where things are yet. However, I am sure that I am not the only one with these concerns. Fortunately, Digg has shown that they listen to their users. Their users are what power their service. Without the users, Digg would be worthless.
EDIT: I just realized that the new chronological filtering gives you the top stories in the last 24 hours, not today’s top stories. This gives me my recent news in more of a rolling format. It also orders these stories by diggs, not by time. This takes away my ability to visit digg throughout the day and start browsing stories from where I left off earlier in the day. What a gimp.