Redesigning Twitter

We are in a moment in time when we can rarely design for one screen/device anymore. More and more people are accessing the web and content via numerous devices. We must strike a balance between consistency and appropriateness. We must approach design as a system of connected components, not as pages (legacy thinking). From July to December 2011 the Twitter Design team undertook a daunting challenge: baseline and redesign Twitter across 5 clients and create new embedded tweets display as well.

We faced many challenges (I will talk about a lot of these). We did some really great things, we did some really stupid things (I will talk about these too). We learned a ton and evolved a process that allowed ~12 designers to work in tandem and build a design language and system — a solid foundation for us to iterate upon. In the end, I want to tell the story of how we pulled off this crazy project, what we learned from it (both what to do and what not to do) and how that can inform the design process and approach to designing for our multi-device future.

Recorded at Industry 2013: http://industryconf.com