How does this actually indicate it had to do with the redesign? Sure the trend may be going up, but the site is increasing in popularity so that makes sense that it is going up. There are more people there to interact with and more communities people can join that they may be interested in following and discussing things in.<p>I am just wondering how this rise is attributed to the CSS change? It may have had some effect, but I'm confused how this single graph says that it is because of a CSS change?
One quibble: there are way more than 'CSS' changes here. They removed extra wording, removed the CAPTCHA, and generally reorganized the window.
Sorry but this chart:
<a href="http://www.donotlick.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/newdesign.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.donotlick.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/newdesig...</a><p>Doesn't seem convincing evidence to me
It's refreshing to see what is to my eyes clearly a cleaner and more modern design actually performing better than what looks like a kludgy FrontPage design. Too often these analyses purport to show the opposite.
The before-and-after image shows a much less cluttered sign-up form<p><a href="http://www.donotlick.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/cheat.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.donotlick.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/cheat.pn...</a><p>However, the Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) recommend <i>against using placeholder text in form fields</i>. They list 7 main reasons. This is taken from their website<p>1. Disappearing placeholder text strains users' short-term memory<p>2. Without labels, users cannot check their work before submitting a form<p>3. When error messages occur, people don’t know how to fix the problem<p>4. Placeholder text that disappears when the cursor is placed in a form field is irritating for users navigating with the keyboard<p>5. Fields with stuff in them are less noticeable.<p>6. Users may mistake a placeholder for data that was automatically filled in<p>7. Occasionally users have to delete placeholder text manually<p>Obviously, not all of these will apply to the Reddit sign-up form (or to your own website). It's worth reading the full NNG article to get a different but valid perspective based on their research:<p><a href="http://www.nngroup.com/articles/form-design-placeholders/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nngroup.com/articles/form-design-placeholders/</a>
Submission title is a bit clickbaity and does not match the more modest actual article title, which is "8% Increase in reddit Account Registrations".
I wish I had a screenshot of the original version. It was absolutely awful. It seemed like the code wasn't touched in at least 5 years.<p>Nice job with the redesigned version, but in all seriousness... I wonder what took so long? Every few months a company should take a spin as a new user and find ways to refine the new-user process.<p>Use this as a reminder to take another look at your registration sign-up process in 2015.
This is a typically poor example of ignoring the complexities inherent in analysing new user acquisition.<p>Suppose you implement a change that causes the registration form to crash for some subset of people? I am sorry to say for a while I was responsible for causing such issues at a very large service ;) Depending where the crash occurs and where you are counting signups you may actually get a massive boost in your metrics, as the victims retry with every attempt met by failure.<p>Suppose you correct an issue making it easier for people to login? Then lower registrations - the key here is to make sure you have a good metric to look at (e.g. accounts created that are interacting well with the site after as long a window as possible).
A bit more data would be nice to corroborate the claim. I understand some of the criticism in the comments. :)<p>If you are looking for some ridiculous correlation claims, check out the spurious correlation.<p>Here's an example,<p>The number of people who drowned by falling into a swimming pool correlates with the number of films Nicolas Cage appeared in.<p><a href="http://www.tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=359" rel="nofollow">http://www.tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=359</a><p>:)
IMO the design of Reddit's website could use an overhaul. I can't even snap it to one side of my screen without totally screwing up the front page and forget about using the site on mobile. The sidebars contain way too much unnecessary information as well. I do love me some reddit though.
any way to check which ones are real people and which ones are bots creating accounts for some reason ? maybe their activity posting vs subreddit popularity... I guess you may be surprised.