Digg Undergoes Design Overhaul to Draw Back Users

Competition in social media and social bookmarking has always been fierce and grows increasingly tough for both veterans and startups. Digg, the once popular social bookmarking site, painfully recognized this fact after recent stumbles and has overhauled its entire interface in order to restore confidence and lure back users it had shed.

The overall reboot has been divided into three major branches. The first branch involves Digg’s overall look; key topics (i.e. Technology, Science, Gaming, etc.) will now be posted at page’s top rather than the side, Story pages have been revamped, and the “Submit” feature will feature more prominently than “Search” with its own box on top of every page.

Search has been downgraded to a magnifying glass icon that a user must click on first before the search box appears. The second branch involves upgrading individual profile pages by reintroducing user statistics (submission, commenting, and following) which were previously left out of the site’s recent incarnation.

Finally, Digg is incorporating new, opt-in notifications for users when their posts reach “Top News”. Granted, “Top News” no longer has the luster it once had since “My News” became the default status; however, one can still feel a bit of pride knowing their writing has reached the front page and Digg will now immediately notify you if indeed it has reached that position.

Taken as a whole, these changes are a fairly comprehensive overhaul that Digg hopes will counteract the revolt it faced from users last August when the site was last changed. Since that time, traffic has withered leading to layoffs comprising more than one third of its staff.

These updates though will be introduced over the coming weeks as opt-ins for users; hopefully the once prominent social bookmarker can make amends to those who feel it burned them all too recently.