Reviewing the Reddit Search Experience

Here's the "r/all" subreddit, that shows the most popular content across all of Reddit. Can you spot the search bar?

It's in the right sidebar, and it has many issues:

• It's not were most people would expect to find it (at the very top of the page)
• It's very narrow (so not much space to type)
• And the placeholder is very bland ("search" doesn't say much)

When I click on the input, a yellow box appears just below with two options: "include NSFW results" and "advance search". Seing a UI element appear out of nowhere and with a bright color is quite distracting, especially when these options could have been shown later on the results page.

Typing a search query requires some effort: thinking about what we are looking for, finding the right keywords, and actually typing them correctly. So Reddit should help users here, instead of distracting them.

The video game Hades II was recently released, so let's type "hades" in the input. But wait, where's the "search" button?

After some time I realized that the small magnifying glass icon is the button, but that's really easy to miss! I guess they expect users to press "enter" to submit the form, and that's what I did.

Now I'm on the search result page. There's a lot going on here, so let's look at every section one by one, from top to bottom.

At the top we get the search bar with our query. It makes sense, but that's a bit disorienting since it's not where it was previously. Note that this search input is much better than before: it's in a more logical position, it's wider, and this time there is a "🔎" button that looks clickable. They also removed the bright yellow box.

Then we get some results, but it's not immediately clear what these are. It's actually a list of subreddits that match my search query. A label indicating this would have been nice.

Next we get more search results, and this time we know what they are since there is a "posts" label. There's a lot of positive things to say here:

• The word I typed in the search bar ("hades") has been bolded in the titles. This makes it clear why each result was returned.
• Results are relevant. This is thanks to clever a ranking algorithm that combines the number of upvotes (the higher the better) and the date (the more recent the better).
• Each result contains valuable information to help me decide if I should click on it or not: thumbnail, title, points, comment count, etc.

On the negative side, a lot of emphasis is put on the post flairs ("video game", "Hades II", etc.) which don't seem valuable here.

There's also two dropdowns:

• One for sorting ("relevance", "top", "new", "comments")
• And one filtering ("all time", "past hour", "past 24 hours", etc.)

Both are useful, but the sorting names are confusing and could be clarified.

Below the last result, there's the pagination. Except there's not really a concept of page here, it's just two buttons: "prev" and "next". So it's easy to get lost after a few clicks.

Reddit is not known for its great user experience, and that shows in how they handle search. But to be fair the results were very relevant.

Also note that Reddit recently released a new version of their website with a revamped search experience. I'll need to review it soon!

If you liked this, make sure to check my other articles about Search Experience.