I find the problems with Twitter less annoying because the functionality and utility are "so far, so good." I imagine were they to have the resources of Google the interface problems would have been gone. I don't know ... .
Mark Giles
· 3 months ago
I find that when you try and type a tweet on the twitter.com interface it's slow and sluggish. I have to wait while the text catches up. I really didn't get into Twitter until I got Twitterfon for my iphone, then my twitter usage increased dramatically. I find I only use twitter.com when I want to look at things I favorite that contain flash video. I also like the Retweet function in Twitterfon. Twitter should include this as well.
Jeff Greco
· 3 months ago
Sounds like a weird problem on your browser's part. Twitter is including retweeting supposedly soon.
andrewbaron
· 3 months ago
Twitter has such a simple feature set, you dont need the resources of Google. Just one ordinary designer could take care of it. A great designer would make it better than normal. Currently is sub-normal.
ChartShark
· 3 months ago
If it wasn't for programs like Tweetdeck, I would never have stuck around Twitter.
I'm sure if they found a way to properly monetize Twitter they'd suddenly have more interest in fixing their interface (amongst other) problems. Until then, it's unlikely to get much better.
David Sanger
· 3 months ago
There's another way to get back to the "logged-in" Twitter home page.
If you are looking at the page of a person you follow, click the little down-arrow and a div appears with the text, "You follow XXX" and below that "xxx's tweets appear in your timeline"
Click on the word "timeline" and you go home.
home == timeline
at least here
andrewbaron
· 3 months ago
WTF?
David Sanger
· 3 months ago
perhaps that's not clear.
under the gravatar of a person you follow, on their profile page, is a line of text starting with an arrow, that says: "Following XXX - Device updates OFF"
that's the dropdown that has the "timeline" link
andrewbaron
· 3 months ago
Oh you were clear all right. I was just thinking outloud, wondering how now home could equal timeline, a word that applies to every layout of tweets. A timeline of your tweets, a timeline of your friends tweets, or a timeline of AT&T complaints. This further suggests that there is a break down in the hierarchical structure of the navigation even in concept.
David Sanger
· 3 months ago
also:
If you are looking at someone's page, and not following them, and want to send them a mention (an @message), how do you do it?
You can pick a tweet in their timeline and click the reply, but then that is a reply to that message.
Note: If you do follow them or are followed then clicking on the action "Send Mention" in the "actions" dropdown in your following or followers page will do this.
There just doesn't seem to be a way to do it from the home page or from the person's own page
I found myself at that funny link url when I clicked on "Business" in the footer. Once there, check out the logo (i think you could call it the logo) on the top left, it breathes for some reason and it's clickable to refresh the otherwise static page.
FredDavis
· 3 months ago
Horrible interface, poor quality of service, buggy, NO tech support (my main @freddavis account was hacked in April and I still can't get in)... back in the day, we used to have those darn magazines reviewing stuff and keeping vendors honest... or at least holding their feet to the fire for abuser-interfaces... so thanks for that nice critique.
Gargamel
· 3 months ago
I hereby declare Twitter will be knows as Twatter until these simple fixes are implemented.
Jerome
· 3 months ago
Well that's very interesting since Twitter is getting a lot of praise concerning its design, made by Vitor Lourenco. He's good and the design really is elegant.
Even though I had never noticed it before as I've been using other sites or software which made good use of their API, reading your point about the general flow of the user experience is indeed troubling.
I'm building a site which has its own sort of twitter stream of tweets... I'll definitely take all of this in consideration, not to repeat their mistakes.
I can understand how the user experience designer decided to do it that way. The "home" for logged out user is meant to convert them into registered users. Once logged in, the "home" becomes your feed and hopefully you'll never log out and always see this as your home thereafter. It's true though, this and all of which you described is confusing to the user. Facebook does well in that respect and it gives them an edge.
David Sanger
· 3 months ago
In an interview on Designers Couch Vitor says of his expertise:
"I often change these titles—and haven’t found the perfect one yet."
IMO the look is OK if you like light blue, but the nav is confusing as noted.
sull
· 3 months ago
it's hysterical. i've wanted to do a ranting post about this for awhile. thank you so much for doing it instead :)
my post was going to also focus on myspace.com (obvious shit UI) and facebook ( a bloated clusterfuck.. especially developer pages). and these are some of the most popular and successful web sites.... ever.
and just the other day i actually took a plunge into google reader.... i use it everyday but i only focus on the feeds/items listed, not really any of the other features/sections. well i tried to be daring and look around. i've known of some of the new func like "send to" and have realized that it is a socially evolving webapp. but i have not actually used these features more than a handful of times. wow, talk about a horrid experience! it's just so bad.
and these are the cream of the crop?
on the other hand, i recently used brizzly.com and was delighted with it's design approach. ironically, they are former google reader engineers!
Rob Wilmot
· 3 months ago
The smartest thing Twitter did (in my opinion) was to open up their service with their API. Arguably it's tools like Tweetdeck (which is a more useful interface that Twitter's own), Seesmic and Tweetmeme which have driven the success of Twitter. Curious about this, I ran a test last week and out of the 400 Tweets, which I counted on my Tweetdeck, only 50 came from Twitter direct the rest came from other tools connected to the API. In your blog post you rightly point our Twitter's seeming lack of attention to the functionality and usability of thier own site. It can't be through lack of money (they've got through plenty). Looking at their press releases in terms of how they propose to make money in the future through charging for authenticated Twitter accounts and deeper analytics aimed at the business community, you have to ask yourself 'Are Twitter more interested in promoting the API as an enterprise solution, rather than drive traffic to Twittter as a destination site?' This could be a very smart play - charge a fee for the account whilst driving increasing volumes of traffic through third parties. Free customer acquisition.
Nitin Hayaran
· 3 months ago
I am also a newbie to twitter, and for me the biggest hurdle to get started on twitter is its lingo. what the heck it RT , @, T, # etc etc... Why can't we have something simpler. That is the reason why i prefer Facebook status.
On part of its design I do agree with you on some points. But in my opinion these problems are not very big, A user will learn it very quickly and after few visits these will not pose any problem.
There are a lot of small small design/usability innovations in twitter which one can't deny. And these innovations very easily outnumber the problems you mentioned.
So I don't think that these problem can any why hamper twitter.... But i do agree that there is a lot of room for improvement.
steve
· 3 months ago
I like the design and appreciate it's simIplicity. It is not complicated and is pretty intuitive. It also doesn't have about 8 quarter Meg screen grabs on the page either unlike this one.
If the author doesn't know how to compress these grabs to a maximum of 70k without losing detail maybe he shouldn't be writing about web design.
Final point, Twitter was always intended to be used via multiple devices and interfaces, the website is just one option and a quick look on Tweetdeck would indicate that the website is not the point of access for most.
andrewbaron
· 3 months ago
Steve, good point on the image size, I will reduce. Also, I agree and think Twitter's model of keeping the feature set minimal was a needed step for its growth, in order to engage all of the 3rd party business. Agreed, agreed, agreed. However, your arguments suffer from a fallacy called "Tu Quoque" which attempts to defend oneself or another from criticism by turning the critique back against the accuser. This is a classic Red Herring - attacking the size of my screenshots is entirely unrelated to any refutation of Twitter's design.
Because Twitter has such a small feature set, for whatever reason, it should be easy to put the interface together.
Yaili
· 3 months ago
Ha!
Twitter's UI is a mess indeed! And I don't think you've mentioned my favourite one: it really annoys me that the sign in form is completely different if you sign in from twitter.com or from a user's profile page.
And how about http://help.twitter.com? There's a whole new set of UI rules to extract from that one ;)
carlwirth
· 3 months ago
Thanks for the tips, I was unaware of these items
NicholasModesto
· 3 months ago
I agree that Twitter could use some UX work to make things not as vague, but is anyone still logging into twitter? I use TweetDeck all day long with the ability to form group feeds, and see FB status updates as well as the typical twitter functionality. The only reason why i still need to log on to twitter's web interface occasionally is to look over the new people following me. Twitter is a great platform and their tool is kinda weak, but the API has allowed for the development of much better tools to take advantage of the platform.
sushantanand
· 3 months ago
Andrew - it would be nice if your logo was clickable too. It took me a few seconds before i could find "home" on your site too.
Btw, i loved the article and felt it was extremely thoughtful.
andrewbaron
· 3 months ago
Forgot to mention using Twitter from a mobile phone. I think its safe to say more than a few people use twitter from their mobile phones. Here is a screen shot of a terribly sloppy problem which speaks for itself: http://twitpic.com/h1ayh
Brian
· 3 months ago
The non-logged in Twitter home page shows Trending Topics by 3 time-frames: Right Now, Today, and This Week (those names discoverable only available by hover text).
Once you log in, how can you see those 3 types of Trending Topics? As far as I can tell, you must log out.
In other words, Twitter may be the only website that offers LESS functionality to registered, logged-in users.
All Comments
I'm sure if they found a way to properly monetize Twitter they'd suddenly have more interest in fixing their interface (amongst other) problems. Until then, it's unlikely to get much better.
If you are looking at the page of a person you follow, click the little down-arrow and a div appears with the text, "You follow XXX" and below that "xxx's tweets appear in your timeline"
Click on the word "timeline" and you go home.
home == timeline
at least here
under the gravatar of a person you follow, on their profile page, is a line of text starting with an arrow, that says: "Following XXX - Device updates OFF"
that's the dropdown that has the "timeline" link
If you are looking at someone's page, and not following them, and want to send them a mention (an @message), how do you do it?
You can pick a tweet in their timeline and click the reply, but then that is a reply to that message.
eg.
https://twitter.com/?status=@XXX%20&in_reply_to...
What if you want to just send a tweet starting with their @name
eg.
https://twitter.com/?status=@XXX
what do youpress?
Note: If you do follow them or are followed then clicking on the action "Send Mention" in the "actions" dropdown in your following or followers page will do this.
There just doesn't seem to be a way to do it from the home page or from the person's own page
I found myself at that funny link url when I clicked on "Business" in the footer. Once there, check out the logo (i think you could call it the logo) on the top left, it breathes for some reason and it's clickable to refresh the otherwise static page.
Even though I had never noticed it before as I've been using other sites or software which made good use of their API, reading your point about the general flow of the user experience is indeed troubling.
I'm building a site which has its own sort of twitter stream of tweets... I'll definitely take all of this in consideration, not to repeat their mistakes.
I can understand how the user experience designer decided to do it that way. The "home" for logged out user is meant to convert them into registered users. Once logged in, the "home" becomes your feed and hopefully you'll never log out and always see this as your home thereafter. It's true though, this and all of which you described is confusing to the user. Facebook does well in that respect and it gives them an edge.
"I often change these titles—and haven’t found the perfect one yet."
IMO the look is OK if you like light blue, but the nav is confusing as noted.
my post was going to also focus on myspace.com (obvious shit UI) and facebook ( a bloated clusterfuck.. especially developer pages). and these are some of the most popular and successful web sites.... ever.
and just the other day i actually took a plunge into google reader.... i use it everyday but i only focus on the feeds/items listed, not really any of the other features/sections. well i tried to be daring and look around. i've known of some of the new func like "send to" and have realized that it is a socially evolving webapp. but i have not actually used these features more than a handful of times.
wow, talk about a horrid experience! it's just so bad.
and these are the cream of the crop?
on the other hand, i recently used brizzly.com and was delighted with it's design approach. ironically, they are former google reader engineers!
On part of its design I do agree with you on some points. But in my opinion these problems are not very big, A user will learn it very quickly and after few visits these will not pose any problem.
There are a lot of small small design/usability innovations in twitter which one can't deny. And these innovations very easily outnumber the problems you mentioned.
So I don't think that these problem can any why hamper twitter.... But i do agree that there is a lot of room for improvement.
If the author doesn't know how to compress these grabs to a maximum of 70k without losing detail maybe he shouldn't be writing about web design.
Final point, Twitter was always intended to be used via multiple devices and interfaces, the website is just one option and a quick look on Tweetdeck would indicate that the website is not the point of access for most.
Because Twitter has such a small feature set, for whatever reason, it should be easy to put the interface together.
Twitter's UI is a mess indeed! And I don't think you've mentioned my favourite one: it really annoys me that the sign in form is completely different if you sign in from twitter.com or from a user's profile page.
And how about http://help.twitter.com? There's a whole new set of UI rules to extract from that one ;)
Twitter is a great platform and their tool is kinda weak, but the API has allowed for the development of much better tools to take advantage of the platform.
Btw, i loved the article and felt it was extremely thoughtful.
Once you log in, how can you see those 3 types of Trending Topics? As far as I can tell, you must log out.
In other words, Twitter may be the only website that offers LESS functionality to registered, logged-in users.