Threads — UX Case Study | Part 1: UX Review
Tell me you’re not ready to shift from Twitter to Meta’s threads currently. Cause I have been fed-up using Threads in much less time using it. Though it has reached 100 million+ users already, everyone is demanding of various features that it should include (if not everyone, at least me). Threads poses to be direct competitor of Twitter (Meta copied so smoothly) with same text/images based social platform to share your opinions, thoughts about anything.
Key differentiators are, Threads can be a private/public space for users, while Twitter is public for all. Over the time Twitter has become crowded with bots, ads, fake news and what not. Hopefully Threads is not anything like that (currently), uses your Instagram login information, which is pretty genuine and you can’t unlink or delete your account and its only possible through deleting your Instagram account (another topic of discussion maybe).
Now talking about what I’m here to do, to redesign it in such a way, using users familiarity bias of using apps like Instagram and Twitter and provide best user experience with possible solutions to existing UX issues in the app. (it’s too early, it has just launched right? anyways.)
Lets just skip the chase and directly enter the UX review of the Threads app.
1. Home
Currently as you can see, the font weight and contrast is too high, its nearly difficult to scan the whole homepage, and what should I focus on and read?
The posts seem to stacked up with small icons to interact with. The whole Instagram theme is okay, but is it right for text focused social media app?
According to me, its not perfectly fit for it, we need some font and contrast tweaks for overall user interface.
2. Search
My very first question over here is, why there are no trending posts/topics? Instagram offers exploration of posts based on your activity, and also displays trending searches. Also twitter has trending hashtags and topics while exploring. Why not do similar thing over here?
People know why they’re here for, adding ‘Search’ label on top, along with placeholder text on search input, its redundant information.
Even if I follow few of these suggested people, what next? It would have been more relevant for me to see their posts and interact with those.
3. New Post
One of the cleanest page with empty canvas, feels like I can express myself here. But wait, I have few questions!
Is there a word limit?
What’s that attachment icon for? I can upload photos and videos, alright.
I can add to a thread here itself, that’s nice.
Where are the engagement tools?! Hashtags, Location tags, GIFs, Polls, Links. I am missing all this (go back to twitter I guess)
Meta has world’s best content creator tools at their disposal but none are here, they need to take care about this.
4. Activity
The categorisation of activity types is good, like ‘All’, ‘Replies’, ‘Mentions’. Why ‘Verified’ as a separate category? It can be brought under ‘All’ category.
Prioritising verified users updates as separate category seems like a over-do. Giving too many filtering options as categories isn’t helpful.
No signifier for recent notifications? I can’t distinguish which activity is latest and unread.
Including count of new notifications is much more helpful than displaying just a red dot for unread updates.
5. Account
Again, too much contrast, loosing focus, where to look at?
Consider the case of multiple account logins, it should be consistent with single account also.
Why is there separate navigation for Privacy settings? It can be brought under profile settings.
Profile information takes up a lot of unnecessary space of the screen, considering the case of smaller devices, it would cover half the space of the screen, which shouldn’t happen.
Breathing space should be managed within the posts, they’re too stacked up.
I mentioned all the possible UX issues I could notice above, but what about its solutions? Lets discuss about that.
Design thinking and approach
Thread’s being Instagram backed new platform, it would have all the the features that Instagram already supports like hashtags, polls, location tagging and gifs and many more in near future. Benefitting from users previous usage habits of Twitter also plays pivotal understanding of app’s features, which makes it easier to understand and use.
Users are already familiar with Instagram’s theme and have no hard time switching into threads also. Cross-platform sharing between Threads and Instagram also enables smooth transitioning of user behaviours, enabling smooth user experience overall.
I’ve tried to give my feedback on the app, there might be still some shortcomings that I might have missed. We be glad to know your opinions/suggestions on it :)
Design at Meta Instagram Engineering
