In an effort to practice my design skills and hone them I decided to start a series of design explorations. The first being Digg.com. These explorations are how I would redesign the website if I had complete control.
THESE DESIGNS ARE IN NO WAY ASSOCIATED WITH DIGG, THEY ARE JUST EXPLORATIONS
This design exploration is a logged in version of the digg homepage. Let me explain my decisions.
Layout
The first thing I wanted to pick was a layout. I choose a three column layout, for a few reasons. I felt like the digg stream should be closer to the top, which gives it more focus IMO. Also I wanted an importance order, the first being navigation, then content and last upcoming content. This moves the extra links and stuff from the top to the left and right.
Color
I used the same color pallet that digg has today, but I use green as an emphasis, instead of blue. I really just choose the green cause I liked it.
Content
The left column (primary column) contains the navigation for moving around the categories, the digg logo, and a large submit new button. I felt like the Submit new button had to be the most distinct call to action on the page. This is digg’s bread and butter. ;) So I made it large and orange. The placement of the logo I felt should be at eye level with the other columns, because it decreased the vertical space. The logo itself was my attempts to make something new and fresh feeling.
The main column contains only the digg stories. I purposfully left out, the header “All, News, Videos, & Images” because I didn’t want anything getting in the way of the stories, I felt like the indicated category on the left was enough to let the user know where they are. The main column is fluid, I did this mainly because digg’s site does it now. But I like the feeling of the stories not being restricted.
The right column, contains these things as I veiw it; Search, User, Personalized Feeds(Friends, Upcoming) and Top Stories. I see the right column as the stream that feeds the main column. These are the specialized stories that haven’t made it yet, but the digg algorithm finds them important. And because the user’s photo and name are there, the user can resonably assume that those stories are for him.
What I missed
There are some things I skipped cause they’ll take more thought, and some that I left out because this is a mock, and I don’t see a change in behavior.
The skipped points are sub-categories and sorting by time or type. My first instinct was to place these things at the top of the river of stories. But I soon realized that this added garbage to the river, and could cloud the stories. I also didn’t place the paginator, because I can’t decide on wheather the pagination should be outside the white box, or if digg should adopt a “more” method similar to twitter’s stream.
Some of the things I left out just because I see no change; I feel like the items around the digg story are not gonna change much, like the icons and I think the username can/should stay with the story. One thing I do feel unecessary is in the digg shade today, it says “100 diggs” I think the diggs is unecessary. Removing it gives the count more space, and highlights the fact that you can digg it “+ digg”
This design is far from perfect, and I’ll be the first to admit that, but I think I demonstrated some of the main design points I feel could make a solid re-design of Digg.com.
If you enjoyed reading this post, check out this post Submit to Digg Bookmarklet.
This is pretty interesting. I like the way the submit button is displayed. It would certainly increase the number of submissions!