I’m not speaking for Ada, but I’m happy to give my own views.
We’d certainly take you criticism onboard, and probably concede that our current design isn’t especially inspirational or feature-rich. We’re pushing a lot of text on a lot of very different topics – from marketing to design to high-level code – so highly distinctive design that also fits everyone’s needs is a challenge. In many ways we’re trying to get out of the way on the content.
Measuring the relative success of aesthetic design is hard. However, the things we can measure tell a story that we’re happy with.
We relaunched 18 months ago, and you’re welcome to skim Twitter from August 2013 to get a sense of the feedback. We had some technical hiccups, but the response was to the design was overwhelmingly positive.
Of course, that’s nice and all, but still not a clear measurement of success.
Site traffic has almost doubled in the time since that relaunch. Sure, we’d like to think there are other factors contributing to that increase, but the redesign was a huge factor.
Each of the sites that Ada talks about above had sizable drop-offs in traffic and/or notable user backlash.