Twitter UX Review — June 2018

A lifetime ago, in internet years, Twitter made a fantastic UX discovery. They made chatrooms scalable, social media more approachable and despite the spray tanned elephant in the room, communication on the web became more thoughtful. All accomplished by introducing a simple feature that users were certainly not asking for, the 140 character limit.

Since then, Twitter has maintained a fairly minimal product. They’ve introduced new media types, an ad network, threaded tweets, polls and a more generous 280 character limit. Compared to Facebook, Twitter is still very lean. But you can’t introduce new features without also introducing new UX challenges to overcome. So let’s explore Twitter’s standard web interface and see what we find!

Pain Points

Tweets are not scannable
Images now dominate Twitter feeds. This means you can typically expect to see about 2 tweets above the fold. It’s virtually impossible to follow hundreds or thousands of people at once. I’d really like to see a compact mode. Media and meta data should predictably expand on demand and seamlessly collapse when dismissed.

I suspect the web version of Twitter is optimized for entertainment. Focusing on media is probably more likely to keep users engaged longer. TweetDeck seems to be more optimized for more serious…