Reddit is home to the most authentic conversations on the internet. As of 2018, Reddit's popularity has surged to 330 million monthly active users in spite of a UX largely unchanged for a decade. This year, the company launched its first major redesign to make Reddit a more welcoming place for all. In his session, Chris Slowe, CTO and Founding Engineer of Reddit, will tell the story of how Reddit was built - and rebuilt - to enable its teams to scale rapidly and unveil its much-anticipated redesign. He will share the process and philosophy of Reddit's new UX, reflect on the community's feedback, and offer advice from developing and designing hand-in-hand with arguably the internet's most vocal, opinionated users.

1. Building a new home
for Redditors

2. Who is this guy?
● PhD in Experimental Physics
○ Emphasis on the “science is messy” part
● Founding Engineer at Reddit (’05-’10)
○ Mostly doing platform and Infrastructure work
when they still let me code.
○ Though the frontend stack we’re replacing is
mostly my fault. We all have experimental
phases.
● Returned to Reddit in middle ‘15 just in time to
help undo my past mistakes
○ CTO in early ‘17, so guess they are my
mistakes again.

3. What is Reddit?

4. What is Reddit?
Reddit is the frontpage of the internet
A social network where there are tens
of thousands of communities around
whatever passions or interests you
might have
It’s where people converse about the
things that are most important to them

5. Reddit by the numbers
Alexa Rank (US/World)
MAU
Communities
Posts per month
Comments day
Votes per day
4th/6th
350M+
1M+
10.7M
2.8M
58M

6. Bring community and
belonging to everyone
Our Mission

7. Change is hard...

8. 2005

9. 2009

10. 2013

11. 2017

12. ...especially for Redditors

13. Step 0
Why do we redesign?

14. Why did we Redesign Reddit?
There were many reason to redesign, we
aimed to…
● ...change Reddit’s brand perception
● ...simplify Reddit to make it welcoming
● ...increase our development velocity

15. Step 1
Build a foundation

16. 16
Second System

17. Don’t Redesign & Rewrite Together
We had to rewrite and redesign given
community styling, but how did we
navigate the second system?
● First we did a full tech rewrite
● We launched it as an A/B test
● After that we redesigned

18. We decided to start with mobile apps

19. And our users
noticed a certain
subtle difference

20. Step 2
Design a new home

21. Redesign War Room

22. Designing while Building the Foundation
We had 3 months to design a great
experience while developers were busy
● We started with design sprints
● Established a war room
● Dedicated Friday’s to crazy ideas

23. ACT 3
Could you live here?

24. Concept Interviews before Building

25. Imagining the New Reddit
Building is expensive therefore we had to
validate our ideas prior via user interviews
● Do users actually want to use it?
● Impact on different user groups?
● Will this help us achieve our goals?

26. Step 4
Experience it

27. Product Interviews while Building

28. Experience with Real Content
You hardly ever get it right the first try, we
put our product in the hands of users
● Let users use the actual product
● Validate how it works with real content
● Start the iteration loop

29. Step 5
Maintain Familiarity

30. Balance Familiarity & Change
We needed to keep Reddit familiar but
make it more inclusive
● Don’t change how Reddit works
● Be cognisant of change aversion
● Focus on what makes Reddit great -
Communities

31. Step 6
Communities First

32. Putting Communities First
Communities make Reddit special that’s
why we launched via Moderators
● Include moderators very early
● Understand what communities need
● Make it their journey

33. Design issue: CSS
● Legacy stack allows for arbitrary styled components with CSS!
● Tradeoff: total DOM lock-in

34. Design solution: Structured Styles

35. r/science

36. r/itookapicture

37. r/baseball

38. Step 7
Listen to Users and Evolve

39. Our users are more creative than us

40. Be Humble & Listen
We needed to learn from our users to
build a product they want to use
● We studied what users did with CSS
● We started a dedicated community
● We listened and took action

41. We actually build what most users want

42. Step 8
Build Moment on Reddit

43. Stay calm and balance the conversation

44. Building Momentum on Reddit
No one likes surprises therefore we had to
communicate often & early with Redditors
● Handled directly by PMs & Designers
● Launched a blog post series
● Amplified the voice of our advocates

45. Step 9
Launch to Early Adopters
Alpha
Tester
Helpful
User
Styling
Mod
Nightmode
Enabler

46. Navigating Early Adopters
We had to fully understand moderators
and beta users to navigate them
● We add all mods and beta users early
● We didn’t get in their way
● We gave them other tasks to focus on

47. Step 10
Metrics

48. Are we launch ready?
Redesigns are hard to measure,
especially ours since its so different
● Form a strong hypothesis
● Defined Metrics at the beginning
● Small rollout group to learn and debug

49. Step 11
Opening for Users

50. Launching to 330M Users!
There are many challenges launching to
that many people
● Maintain positive sentiment
● Scale up servers
● Capture benefits
● Form predictability

51. Step 12
Listen & Iterate

52. The Redesign is Not Done Yet!
We started our GA rollout however this is
not the end of the journey
● In Q2 we will focus on adoption
● Accessibility and responsive
● Every team needs to build on it

53. 330M Users

54. 150k work hours

55. 50 People

56. 4 Teams

57. All for 1 Redesign

58. Reddit - We Diggit

59. With thanks to the team

60. Thanks!
Chris Slowe
chris@reddit.com
reddit.com/u/KeyserSosa
@KeyserSosa
PS: We’re hiring!
http://reddit.com/jobs