Don’t blame #newtwitter for #oldtwitter’s problems
Lately, there has been a frenzy of praise and complaints for Twitter’s new design. While my personal account (@kevinjohngomez) has yet to see the update (cough, come on, cough), I have had the opportunity to kick the tires a bit with a few of my other accounts. I certainly feel the new design has it’s flaws, but I think it’s critics are giving #oldtwitter more credit than it deserves.
The old Twitter was great (emphasis on “was”), but over the last year Twitter has introduced so many new elements/features (e.g. who to follow, sorting your tweets/mentions, search, lists, trends) that the side bar has become a complete mess of content and actions with little or no hierarchy. The same can be said for actions on a given tweet or user.
New Twitter’s design is not over complicated, Twitter is. This is especially evident when compared to Twitter original functionality. The addition of features have created new usability challenges for the Twitter design team, challenges that until now have had poorly considered solutions crammed into the existing user interface. So while many of us like to think of old Twitter as something pure and simple, it was quickly evolving out of control.
In an attempt to solve this issue, as well as introduce new features common to many Twitter clients (e.g. in-app previews of external content), the designers went back to the drawing board. While I’ll be the first to admit that there are aspects of the new design that are still a mess (e.g. the display of related tweets) the issue is more that the content is unnecessary than it is poorly designed. People love Twitter because it’s a realtime conversation, not because of lists and trends.
Twitter is heading down a dangerous path here. They are on the verge of feature bloat, something that can destroy a good design and turn off even the most devoted users. I’m not saying that Twitter necessarily has a lot of features, but rather more than it really needs. If the designers can’t manage to incorporate these features in a way that doesn’t hinder the user experience, they shouldn’t be adding them in the first place.
At the end of the day, none of this really matters. If Twitter has one thing working in their favor, it’s that many users do not interact with the application through it’s web UI, but rather third party and proprietary apps. Most of this will all blow over once everyone has had a chance to play around with the new design, bitch, and go back to their app of choice. For me, that app is Tweetie, and in the end, Twitter can wow me all they want with their new web interface, but I’m still not going to use it.
