Twitter nailed a few important things in their user experience compared to alternatives like Facebook. Posts are public by default, so there aren’t debates or surprises about privacy. Streams are built out of subscriptions (“following”), not “friendship”—a word that loses meaning when your friends are 500 strangers. And the 140 char limit gives the stream of updates a distinctive rhythm.
But some serious flaws are holding Twitter’s usability back. A collection of hacks that were initially cool and clever among the geekset have turned into de facto features. Why should users have to know what a URL shortener is? Why does attaching a photo to a tweet require third-party tools and diminish your character count?
Twitter’s recent redesign doesn’t address these fundamental user experience problems. Twitter would be easier to use, easier to explain, and easier to expand if they focused on their hits. Following is better than friendship. Public by default is better than public-by-surprise. 140 chars keeps things sharp and rhythmic. A true redesign would separate these genuine insights from the clever geekhacks and make Twitter simpler to use and easier to understand.
Jim Jeffers
on 19 Oct 10I think they are trying to some extent. But I think it’s an uphill battle as they are met with some serious resistance when they try to standardize or incorporate some of this stuff. Just look at the reaction they got when they first tried to streamline RT as a de facto feature. Still – a lot of people (and third party tools) don’t support RT properly. So I think it’s more interesting to see how they address the challenge of taking back some control from their users for the sake of a clearer UX.
Matt
on 19 Oct 10It’s not as easy as it seems—each tweet, regardless of whether it’s been entered via web or any other interface can potentially be delivered to users via text, in which case the character count has to be strictly limited, including image links, etc.
I don’t really how they could get around that without losing backward compatibility.
Scott
on 19 Oct 10Posts are public by default, so there aren’t debates or surprises about privacy.
Scott
on 19 Oct 10(Hmm, that last comment got mangled pretty badly by the parser.)
But the gist of it was that twitter makes it really easy to respond to protected posts with public ones, which is a bit surprising.
CRC
on 19 Oct 10Wouldn’t auto-shortening of URLs be an obvious way to improve usability, especially for less tech-savvy users?
Corey Ballou
on 19 Oct 10Telling Twitter to bolster their feature set to your liking is on par with me putting in feature requests to 37signals to add some useful functionality to a number of their products (I’m talking about you, Basecamp!). Instead, you get a response with some workaround solution on how you can go about achieving what was iterated in your request.
Ryan
on 19 Oct 10Hi Corey. We try to offer a workaround when people request features, because the alternative is to only say “thanks for the request”—and we’d like to help people in the short term if we can. Most of the improvements to our apps begin with customer feedback, so it’s very important to us.
John
on 19 Oct 10Great post! I am normally a lurker, but I had to give you some feedback on this one. Keep it up.
Adam Sentz
on 19 Oct 10I was very surprised to see that they didn’t build the t.co url shortener into the web interface.
Nate Rosenberg
on 19 Oct 10So true, so true. Literally, as I was reading your post, my boss asked me how bit.ly works.
Felix
on 19 Oct 10Why don’t geeks understand that most people actually use Facebook to get in contact with friends (or at least people they know)? For Twitter, following makes sense because of the public-by-default setting. If you accept friend requests from people you don’t know on Facebook you’re doin’ it wrong!
Jed
on 19 Oct 10You are correct.
This is why I’m advising a lot of clients to look into Tumblr. It does a great job of balancing the social/sharing/following/tempo benefits of Twitter with a much easier to understand interface. It does a great job of helping people create/share/express.
It’s also blowing up, in terms of users.
Armando Sosa
on 19 Oct 10Why? We geeks gave twitter it’s success. We stayed faithful to them even when better alternatives (pownce, jaiku, plurk) appeared. We endured the fail whales. We forgave the lack of features and we built apps and invent smart hacks to compensate for it.
Now you are suggesting that Twitter should kick us out so the Justin Bieber’s fan doesn’t get annoyed?. Screw them! They’ll flee to the next cool thing in a year or two anyway.
We’ll stay if they treat us with respect.
Adim
on 19 Oct 10Yeah I dont see the comparison of facebook and twitter, they serve significantly different purpose, within a similar space. If your comparing the “what is on your mind” feature in facebook to twitter then that will be a fair comparison, but facebook is trying to build a social graph of your real world relationships and twitter is trying to give your real time information about what matters/ is happening in the world. How do you compare the execution of the UI’s of these two different companies?
But I think twitter did a good good job in their redesign, and yes I agree with you, there are still problems they need to address, over all i think they are on the right track
Sevki
on 19 Oct 10I think the url shotner and the picture things are cool. this and the @ # symbols… it Created a niche market fot the likes of scott hanselman, brent ozar, and many other bloggers giving thier 2 cents worth to generate hits, i mean really how many people cant create a website with one feature just complicated enough that it’s neither hard or easy to use?
Ian
on 19 Oct 10“Why should users have to know what a URL shortener is? Why does attaching a photo to a tweet require third-party tools and diminish your character count?” – you should understand this very well. If you don’t understand how Twitter works, this product is not for you.
Sean
on 19 Oct 10I disagree with your tone more than the substance of what you’re saying. I like that they have embraced user hacks. It has encouraged innovation and gave their product a game-like feel that enabled its users to transcend the original idea with their own creativity. Twitter provided the most basic functionality, opened up the API and allowed external developers to create solutions. And much more gracefully than Facebook’s third-party strategy.
But I agree that Twitter could develop some core functionality to handle images, etc. Still, it was a smart move to offload that sort of thing - at least initially - to third parties and limiting their overhead.
Alan Hogan
on 19 Oct 10According to Doug Bowman’s reply to me, integrated URL shortening is (of course) a known pain point that they hope to resolve after taking care of bugs and nailing the implementation.
George
on 19 Oct 10a word that loses meaning when your friends are 500 strangers
George
on 19 Oct 10a word that loses meaning when your friends are 500 strangers
This sort of statement just reads as “I’ve never used Facebook” to me.
Brent Ozar
on 19 Oct 10@Sevki – HAHAHA, not sure what you mean about me having a blog that’s a niche market to generate hits. I can’t tell whether that’s a compliment or a criticism. :-D
Brian Kenny
on 20 Oct 10This post baffles me a bit. If twitter should provide a “inbuilt” services for the likes of uploading media or URL shortening then why can the same not be expected of 37 Signals.
For example, an iPhone application. As users would like the ability to add media to their “tweets” and utilize 3rd party apps to do so, so too does this happen with the likes of 37 Signals. I’m sure all “backpack” users would very often get to their data via 3rd party mobile applications that 37 do not provide.
Am I missing something ? Is this not the same ?
cooljaz124
on 20 Oct 10Love the way you said ” Public by default is better than public-by-surprise ” :)
Anonymous Coward
on 22 Oct 10You cares about “backward compatibility”? They have an API, but it’s not like they are a major, critical platform. It’s not like changing IP to IPV6 or SMTP…
And they can warn twitter-client writers in advance: make your clients compatible with the change in six months, or else…
All it takes for a tweeter-client is: a) being able to show more than 140 chars (if the link is shown as text),
and/or
b) being able to show part of the tweet as linkable (if the link is shown only as a clickable label)
Anonymous Coward
on 22 Oct 10@George
And this sort of comment just reads: I’ve never had any friends in real life to compare to, to me…
Anonymous Coward
on 22 Oct 10@Ian
That does not even make sense.
Anonymous Coward
on 22 Oct 10@Felix
Well, “most people” actually have too many NON friends as friends, from their boss to that annoying guy from the gym.
If you don’t accept friend requests from people you don’t like on Facebook you might be “doing it right” but you also come off as insensitive, insulting, socially awkward etc etc…
It has been analyzed to death by the likes of Shirky et al…
This discussion is closed.