Digg upgrades its design

The most popular user-powered news site Digg has today unveiled its updated design and has introduced new functions to visitors. Videos submitted by users can now be played while being on the site itself, the look of the site is cleaner than before. Articles that contain videos now contain a thumbnail besides the article, and can be watched by clicking on it. The comment system, that has long been criticized by Digg’s users, has not seen a revamp. Also, the user-powered site continues to lack a picture section for submitted entries that contain an article with a picture or only picture by itself.

Digg Reloaded: The new look of the page – Click to enlarge

Registered users can submit anything they found on the web to Digg, by giving it a meaningful description and headline. Readers then can visit the submitted page, and rate it by so-called Diggs. The higher the rating, the higher the popularity of the submission. People have the possibility to comment on the submitted content and decide whether it should disappear (Bury) or make it popular, by giving it positive rating. Each positive rating and comment is worth one Digg.

Following up on Kevin’s post from last week, we’ve gone live with improvements to our home page that allow you to see both news and videos on a single page. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback that the videos are entertaining but people miss them because they’re isolated. Bringing them back into the stream on the homepage will hopefully bring more life to videos on the site. If you prefer just news or only videos, you can easily customize your view by setting either as your default home page (login and choose ‘Customize’).

To give the page a cleaner look and make it more functional, we’ve also tweaked the page and story summary layouts, streamlined the navigation, and provided more customization options. And with a new one-click bury, you no longer are required to choose a reason when you bury a story — this aims to help us get more feedback from people about what they don’t like (by making it easier to bury) so we can make more accurate determinations about unpopular content.

This update is also an especially important structural change for future content like images, which will also have its own dedicated section.

Thanks to Kurt Wilms and the other Digg developers who’ve helped make all of this happen. As Kevin described, we’ve got loads of stuff coming down the pipes that we’re working on in parallel right now.

As always, let us know what you think. Cheers! Daniel

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