I am less likely to read all-caps. That is good, because I don't want to read the username. It's usually my username, which is uninformative. I don't want my eye drawn to this box. Other times, I just clicked on a particular user and I probably don't need to be reminded who it is. Not being drawn to the box in that situation is a small cost. If I opened a bunch of user pages in tabs, it would be bad, but I don't do that often. I have no idea if the designers were thinking anything like this.
That's truly ingenious, but (to me) unconvincing: I think my eye is drawn to all-caps things that I'm not already looking at, but tends to skip over sustained passages in all caps in material I'm already reading. So using all-caps for something short, in a corner of the window, doesn't seem likely to help ignore it. Perhaps I'm very atypical?
I saw some discussion posts earlier talking about a LessWrong redesign, and now that things look different, I guess that it's been implemented. I'm always slightly annoyed for a while when a site I use gets redesigned because I have to relearn where everything is, but it eventually wears off once I'm used to the changes.
My initial impressions:
"Hmmm... it seems like the category menus have been replaced by dropdown menus. It's not like I used many of them anyway."
"Okay, I've clicked my name to see my recently posted comments. Now, where's the link to see it in context? Oh, I guess I have to click that icon in the lower right corner. For some reason I was looking for something at the upper right of the comment box."
"Well, that worked. Now how do I click to the parent comment? Oh, wait, it's probably one of those new icons in the lower right corner. I'll just mouseover them to see what they do..."
::realization sets in::
"AAUGH! LESSWRONG IS USING MYSTERY MEAT NAVIGATION!!!"
So, what does everyone else think of the new redesign?