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Twitter: A Clusterfuck of UI Mistakes
- okket 10y agoSo are UIs of Reddit, Facebook, Craigslist, Amazon, ... a bad, usable UI that people are used to > an academic good UI, that nobody understands/uses. Ranting about bad UIs reminds me a bit of ranting about tabloids. They are obviously bad, and nobody reads them if asked, but that does not change the fact that they are very popular. (Please don't use bad UIs as a template if you start fresh, minimalistic is OK)
- fwn 10y agoBut other than Reddit, Facebook or Amazon, Twitter does seem to have a growth problem. I'm not a user and I don't think that I have strong feelings about their service but if forced to visit their page I'm confused most of the time. A bad UI that can't be excused by success ist just a plain, bad UI.
- chucky_z 10y agoMaybe I'm the reverse case, but I really, really like Twitter's UI. Especially their newly redone mobile UI. While Facebook is now completely unusable on my phone, and Reddit is very close (an example of too-much-JS-gone-wrong), going on Twitter is a blast of minty fresh air at my fingertips.
- Grue3 10y agoTwitter has way worse UI than Reddit or Amazon. It's flashy and barely functional, as opposed to crude but extremely functional. Whereas reddit pages load instantly, any Twitter page is a 10 megabytes-sized blob of Javascript that slows your browser to a crawl.
- Stratoscope 10y agoReddit is working hard to catch up to Twitter. Have you tried their new mobile site? It's the worst user experience I've encountered in quite a while. When I go to any page on the site, I get a blank page with an alien in the middle. Quite some time later, the content actually loads. If I tap a link and then go back, it goes through this all over again - and then it doesn't go back to the same scroll position but some arbitrary place. Finally I found a menu option that let me get the desktop Reddit site. I kept trying Chrome's "Request desktop site" but it didn't work. Turned out I had to use a setting in the Reddit mobile site's own menu for this. The desktop site is a huge improvement, but with major flaws of its own. The font sizing on mobile is fairly ridiculous - huge page titles and minuscule comment/etc. links - but at least the pages load fast and it behaves like a normal website. What in the world are they thinking with this new mobile site? If they only fixed up the font sizing in the desktop site it would be perfectly usable on mobile - and much better than their mobile version.
- ansible 10y agoYeah, I'm not too happy with the new mobile version of Reddit. I still use the compact view [1] on my phone, which works fine for everything except moderation. On my tablet I just use the desktop view. [1] http://reddit.com/.compact http://reddit.com/.compact
- TeMPOraL 10y agoI really hope those changes Reddit does are because they're evil and want to track us and spy on us with shit ton of JavaScript. The alternative to that is too horrible to consider - that they may have no fucking clue what they're doing, and like everyone else they're just cargo-culting the current web industry bullshit "standard practices".
- the_other 10y agoI find Reddit so utterly unusable that I don't even have an account. Visiting a Reddit page, all I see is confusing tumble of interface: I can't distinguish content from controls, one level of reply from another, useful content is drowned out by "me too" and "snark". The mobile interface uses text sizing that is too small to read on my device (with my eyesight).
- vacri 10y agoAn 'academically good UI' should be easy to understand. Sure, that doesn't mean people will use it, but the ability of users to understand the UI is pretty fundamental - if they can't understand it, the UI is not 'academically good'. Some places like Craigslist choose to maintain their rougher UI, since a slick UI will scare off some users.
- DanBC 10y ago> a bad, usable UI But Twitter's UI is barely usable. It's not possible to search my past tweets, or someone else's past tweets, for one example. That alone turns twitter from being a useful tool to share information into being a trivial app to share ephemeral nonsense.
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- pdw 10y agoWhat's wrong with Twitter's search page? To me it seems to do everything one might want. https://twitter.com/search-advanced https://twitter.com/search-advanced
- dawnerd 10y agoFacebook's UI is really bad too. If someone links to an image it loads the page with the image, then a second or so later loads the same image in a modal. And if you try to click the image make it bigger it might just close the modal (that's not yet loaded) and take you to the person's timeline.
- mcintyre1994 10y agoAlso you can't navigate huge comment streams in Facebook. I always see some viral image with "xyz friend commented on this", click it and you just see the latest comments in the last 2 seconds.
- ashurov 10y agothis seems to only work well through the (iphone) app. accessing the website through chrome (or similar) shows the behavior you mentioned.
- joe_the_user 10y agoCertainly, Facebook has UI problems but I think there's more going on here. The thing about the Twitter UI isn't just that it's awkward or ugly but that it makes the platform itself itself bad - bad as in making-the-world-a-worse-place bad. When people can't ignore references to themselves, when they can only reply with short retorts, it turns Twitter into the shallow, ugly, uncivil platform that it currently is.
- deleted 10y ago
- thejosh 10y agoYep, I have quite a common name, and my twitter handle is my full name. I grabbed this in 2007, so not too early but early enough. Quite often I get mismentioned, and sometimes if someone big mentions me, Tweetdeck breaks :(.
- steavex 10y agoI am in opposite thinking, that they have great UI, but sure everything can be improved
- hackaflocka 10y ago"Hello green username."
- the_common_man 10y agoAnother thing I am very confused by is that there is no preview for a tweet. If I wanted to upload a picture, it's unclear how big the pic will appear. Many times I will upload a picture, then post it and see that it's MASSIVE and then immediately delete the tweet. I guess nobody uses the web interface to twitter?
- pjc50 10y agoThat's OK, because the web interface resizes everything to the same size. It's unreasonably hard to click through to a fullscreen "just the jpg ma'am" view.
- the_common_man 10y agoAre you saying the web interface resizes all images to the same size? It doesn't, that's my point.
- pjc50 10y agoThe web interface for reading tweets puts everything in "cards", so regardless of the size when you uploaded it it gets resized into the card on display. Unless you right-click-view-image. (Just realised - do you mean size in bytes or size in pixels?)
- julianpye 10y agoTwitter's UI is not just annoying, but it makes it difficult for users to onboard. Most new users are at conferences, watch TV shows, etc... and want to follow a hashtag and see it live. Now... what is a good way for a new user to do this without overload? I haven't found a good way to explain this without using Tweetdeck and even then it often feels like a terminal command gone loose.
- Sylos 10y agoThe biggest UI flaw for me is the picture view on the mobile Twitter-page. They decided to replace the normal .jpg-link with a custom page, but this custom page is auto-fitted to the screen-width, meaning that you cannot actually zoom in on the picture.
- Doctor_Fegg 10y agoI'm not sure you can even do that on desktop Twitter: if you can, I've never found a way to do so. I always end up right-clicking 'Open in new tab' instead.
- huskyr 10y agoYes, this is very annoying indeed. Especially if people post comics or images with lots of detail: there's no way to get the full picture. The only way i know is right clicking and selecting 'open image in new tab', which is a hack.
- leviathan 10y agoIt's not just an issue with Twitter. Every time someone visits Canada's Wonderland I get tagged in an Instagram photo.
- kbody 10y agoWhat I don't understand is, how is it possible to have so many widely known designers working for them but have no impact on the core product used by the majority of the users, it's really baffling to me. Anyone care to shed some light?
- inthewoods 10y agoThis - I often wonder what they hell they are doing all day. Maybe when they first joined they thought they could change things and did solid work, but after it becomes clear that no one is going to change anything, do you just using your time for freelance work?
- bonoboTP 10y agoI have tried to read Twitter a couple of times, but I fail every time and I stopped. For example I'd go to the page of someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Richard Dawkins to see what they post, but I see heaps of retweets and answers and general noise and chit-chat totally out of any context. I'd like to see the original tweets by them, but it seems there's no such functionality. Or to sort them by "popularity" or date or something. Nope, can't be done.
- ajanuary 10y agoI don't know how long it's had it (because I don't use the web UI), but it now has separate views for "Tweets" and "Tweets and Replies".
- intoverflow2 10y ago> Neil deGrasse Tyson or Richard Dawkins Twitter actually ruined my opinion on these individuals. Neil deGrasse Tyson writing smug bitchy tweets about slight inaccuracies in Hollywood sci-fi movies. Painted him in an entirely different light to me Richard Dawkins tweet after tweet of him just arguing with stupid trolls, you're supposed to be a respected academic yet here you are wrestling pigs in the mud because for some reason you feel you have to win every argument.
- the_other 10y agoThat's how Dawkins treats his career as a fundamentalist atheist.
- namaemuta 10y ago> Richard Dawkins tweet after tweet of him just arguing with stupid trolls, you're supposed to be a respected academic yet here you are wrestling pigs in the mud because for some reason you feel you have to win every argument. The world is full of "stupid trolls". If you ignore them bizarre things would happen like people starting to believe AGAIN that the world is flat.
- szatkus 10y ago
- flushandforget 10y agoWhat's the difference between @foo and #foo? Enough said.
- jsemrau 10y ago@foo refers to a user and #foo to a topic. What's the problem?
- talmand 10y agoSeems the problem might be a lack of understanding that @ and # are two different characters that might have different meanings. Kind of like how + and - have different meanings, complete opposites actually, but people just get them confused all the time.
- JadeNB 10y agoI think that flushandforget's point was that not he or she, but the vast majority of users, do not recognise (or do not behave as if they recognise) the difference.
- golemotron 10y agoThis is what happens when the user is not the customer.
- jakobegger 10y agoThe worst part about Twitter is finding context for tweets. It happens so often that I'll stumble across a snarky response, want to know what that was about, but I just can't find a way to find the original tweet that this was obviously a response too. Sometimes clicking a tweet works, sometimes you can scroll up, but often that just doesn't work. Then I click on all the people who are mentioned in the tweet, try to find the context, see that they must have tweeted hundreds of tweets since then, and then I give up...
- throwanem 10y agoClick on the date. It'll reveal the thread. Who doesn't love a discoverable UI, right?
- Udo_Schmitz 10y agoYup, that's why I don't use twitter much. With a 3-character user handle I get a constant stream of totally unrelated mentions from all over the world. Mostly it's users not understanding the difference between @ and # or not getting that usernames on twitter can't have spaces, e.g. @Bob Smith will reach @bob, @bob_smith will never see the tweet.
- throwanem 10y agoTwitter's UI is quite good in fact; it does a solid job of supporting the site's core design purpose as a mostly write-only platform for achieving and sustaining Internet celebrity. I don't really understand what all the fuss is about.
- d33 10y agoI'd argue that you'd call any UI "quite good" after getting used to them. I remember that my first steps with Twitter feel terrible and actually that is sometimes still in the case after browsing it for a longer while.
- throwanem 10y agoThat's kind of the joke. It's not sold as being a megaphone, but when you try to actually use it, you discover that's the only thing it manages not to be terrible at.
- p333347 10y agoOne of the worst bugs with twitter webpage is this. When scrolling down to check overnight tweets on the timeline, and when you have scrolled hundreds of them and you click a regular tweet or a quoted tweet to check responses etc (thankfully quoted tweet opens as a popup lately; it used to open a different page earlier causing pissed_level++) and dismiss the popup, the feed is scrolled back up to the top, and to add to the misery, the tweets in the waiting will be expanded too. You would have to be a regular user of twitter in order to make sense of this and/or empathize.
- nerdponx 10y agoI don't think this is a bug. In the endless quest for eyeballs, they must keep your attention trained on the latest thing. Long attention spans lead to reading articles offsite, and that would reduce eyeball capture... Am I being too cynical here?
- raihansaputra 10y agoIt probably begins as a bug, but left it there by the reasons you mentioned. Or saw it as good enough and doesn't care about users who wants to know more than what happened in the last day/week/month.
- p333347 10y agoI think you just gave a solid reason for the dev team to close the bug as "won't fix"/"not a bug" and that with the backing of the marketing team.
- JohnDoe365 10y ago> This is probably the most embarrassing feature missing on twitter, meaning the inability to click a notification and hide it What would you do with ad? Probably hide it as so would do 95% of other twitter users? Sure, this would be sane behavior for me and a vast majority, but not good for the twitter sales department which is likely to have a hard time anyway.
- cowsandmilk 10y agothat has nothing to do with what is discussed. Person with 100k followers accidentally @mentions you. For the next month, your notifications tab will be filled with people retweeting and replying to that tweet. And then random notifications every couple weeks for years related to that tweet. This has nothing to do with ads.
- martin-adams 10y agoRecently I found out the harsh effect of this missing feature. I tweeted a quick video showing a defective product to a retailer. Several moments later I saw I had 50 notifications and it didn't stop. I was the target for online bullying and abuse, notably because those people appear to be haters of the retailer. How effective this was is actually quite fascinating. I had to go through each notification and block each account that interacted. I even deleted the original tweet, and those they picked on I previously sent. This was a classic case of bullying, but I do feel the tools were definitely lacking to mute it.
- RileyKyeden 10y agoPeople don't realize how it looks on the receiving end. A person @ name searching you will only see tweets, then add on to the flood with "well it's only a few tweets, how is this harassment?". They don't see the flood of retweet/favorite notifications from those mentions. I had this happen not too long ago when a comedian misunderstood something I said and went on a very public rant at me: https://medium.com/@RileyKyeden/jen-kirkman-is-your-problematic-fave-807e7eefa668 https://medium.com/@RileyKyeden/jen-kirkman-is-your-problema... It was only a few tweets, but it produced hundreds of notifications from the original tweets, replies to quote retweets[1] (and favorite/retweet notifications on those), and replies from other famous people whose feeds are watched closely by fans. [1] https://twitter.com/twitter/status/742749353689780224 https://twitter.com/twitter/status/742749353689780224
- martin-adams 10y agoYep, I can totally emphasise what you went though and it's very hard to put under control.
- huskyr 10y agoIf you think the general UI of Twitter is awful, try using it as a media organisation. There's no easy way to share a single account with sharing a password as well, leading to people hijacking the account. Uploading videos is painfully slow, especially if you're used to the speed of YouTube and Facebook. The 'analytics' Twitter provides for videos is a joke: it doesn't show you the tweet attached to your video, so you only get a thumbnail and the name of your account. No way to filter or sort that list as well though. I think many companies would happily fork over $100 per month to Twitter to have a 'media dashboard' that is as easy to use as the one from Facebook.
- xg15 10y agoI wonder if this is a consequence of the modern, "user-story-driven" style of UI development. I'd claim that, back then, when UI design was considered less important, most UIs were either essentially random - or organized around the manipulation of "virtual objects" that conveniently mapped to the underlying data structures. (Files and folders, emails, DB entities, ...) Some of that resulted in you getting a sort of UI consistency "for free", simply because the data structure had to be consistent. So you'd offer the "natural" actions for an object to the user (mostly CRUD) without thinking much which use-cases these actions were fulfilling. In contrast, modern UI design seems to be driven less by abstractions and more by a priority-ordered list of individual use-cases. One consequence of this is that certain features can be missing even though you'd reasonable expect then to be there - because the use-case wasn't decided to be important enough.
- wldcordeiro 10y agoTwitter has also recently started going to greater lengths to lock up images, videos and other media. It used to be easy to download them, now it's next to impossible on mobile and a hassle on desktop.
- gjolund 10y agoWhy is twitter still a thing? It adds no value to my life and is basically a glorified gossip rag at this point.
- teaneedz 10y agoTwitter has had a serious UX problem for ages. I would love to really understand how their UX team functions and the chain of command that led to such a very bad experience.