Comments on: Exclusive Interview With Ajit Balakrishnan On Rediff Redesign, Search, Mobile, Ad Revenue & Its Future Plans

By: Ananth Rudrapaka

Ananth Rudrapaka — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 23:11:39 +0000

Interesting article and even more interesting comments

By: Y man

Y man — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:23:51 +0000

The minimalist philosophy is all right the way in which it is implemented in Rediff.com is bad though. Hmm, Mr Balakrishnan has a lot of things riding on this. Many product managers, directors and vicepresidents who could not agree with this redesign quit the company.Check Linked In for details. Mr:Balakrishnan himself desgined lot of these pages and he has lost touch with Indian internet users. Rediff is losing all those good people they had and the no of people who are leaving this company will only increase if he goes minimalistic through a “forcefit” approach. All the best to the grand old man of Indian internet with his latest experiment.

By: Sridhar Turaga (open2save.com)

Sridhar Turaga (open2save.com) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:32:20 +0000

Rajiv – Congrats and a very timely (and only one it seems) interview!!

With all humility, I think Rediff has erred in many ways here.

#1. The new design makes rediff look empty and incomplete … (There is http://www.rediff.com link above the logo on every page … white space after the content ends and footer starts … the menu in news looks like a place holder … even craigslist is more formal) I’d think there are other design to achieve “simple” and “un-clutter” look

#2. As far as I know 80% of people who visit rediff … go here for current updates and casual news. The constant flow of content as rediff updates and other uploads … is what pulls people multiple times a day … it’s like an addition for most people to keep checking rediff multiple times a day … such content is now kept many clicks away and no one looks for that. It’s impulsive stuff really.

#3. If Rediff wanted to promote other services like Video etc. menu with icons can do the trick … rather than make that the first thing on the left … when a minority come for that

#4. If Rediff wanted to show the power of the new multi-object search and promote the non-ext content they have … they could have easily show associated videos, comments, photos for every article … and slowly increase cross content navigation (like YouTube or SlideShare get u to go from one to the other)