Social Media Today’s post Twitter’s Testing a New Layout for Replies, Focused on Improving Engagement.
Twitter is currently experimenting with a new layout and design for replies. They have clarified that they aren’t near a final yet and continuously ask users for feedback and want to emphasize tweet engagement.
Their key elements from their current mock up designs are: threaded replies with different colored backgrounds (which will make it easier to see who’s typing what), and they want to add green ‘online’ dots to show users who are active to “spark more real time engagement”.
I think these ideas are great, but it does take away from the original Twitter design and gravitates more towards a Facebook kind of feel.
Twitter is smart in asking its’ users for feedback because this way there will be a lot of support behind them as well as making their users feel important.
Author, Andrew Hutchinson, also mentions that users provided many potential options such as: making replies scrollable with the original tweet at the top or giving a “see replies” option so you can collapse them; adding typing indicators or visible timestamps. I think the best change offered was changing the “tweet your reply” to “join the conversation” because this seems a lot more friendly and inviting and makes users feel invited to engage with others.
The article mentions that there will be many opposed because they want to keep Twitter the way it is, but I think we all know the internet is forever growing and changing and will not stop just for the novelty of staying ‘classic’. The green dot showing a user being active will be the biggest change for Twitter and a boost for engagement to the max, because if you see someone is online while you’re reading their tweet — it’ll make you much more inclined to reply to them.
I agree with Hutchinson when he states it was extremely smart for Twitter to consult with their consumers before making any changes permanently, not only for making users feel important and getting great ideas for free (like I stated earlier), it also gives them room to sort out grievances ahead of time.
Overall, I’m excited to see what Twitter brings next and I’m interested to see how close it is to the mock-ups in this article.