I hate #newtwitter more than anyone, but I disagree with the logic that just because people don't like it, it's neccesarily a bad move - lot's of people don't like change.
I've seen it a couple of times on big community websites when people complained about a new design, and then a week later realised that just because it started off not feeling like the site they grew to love, it didn't mean it wasn't a huge improvement.
They key is that, after you force users to switch, it has to be good enough that they realise you were acting in their best interests - if you force them to switch to something that really is much worse, that's when it becomes a problem.
I was wondering: if someone used the Twitter API to create basically a clone of the original site, would that be against the Ts & Cs, and if not could this be got around somehow. For example if someone made it and open sourced it, I could host it myself with my own API key, and without marketing it anyone other than myself and my friends Twitter wouldn't know or care?
> ...just because people don't like it, it's neccesarily a bad move...
In business, it almost always is.
If your user base is uncomfortable with significant changes to your design or interface, you should take that into account. Why are you changing the design or interface? Is it really improving their experience, or is it just because you like the new one better? Why not roll out a new design in lots of small changes over the course of a year or more, so that people don't tend to feel as disoriented?
You should keep in mind that a lot of people out there don't have the learned ability to glance at a screen and immediately pick out the relevant bits. Many of them deal with lots of different interfaces every day. When you radically change your design, for these people it's like having to learn a whole new site all over again.
The best example being Facebook, which has a major campaign to bring back the old Facebook every time there's a serious redesign. And then there's another redesign and many of those same people beg Facebook to being back that version they had complained so much about.
"I've seen it a couple of times on big community websites when people complained about a new design, and then a week later realised that just because it started off not feeling like the site they grew to love, it didn't mean it wasn't a huge improvement." - Very true. Can some one recall the users reaction when FB launched newsfeed
"Hint: if people stick to your old interface rather than to migrate to the new and shiny one then they probably have their reasons. Forcing them is not going to make them happy."
This leads to a dangerous line of thinking. There will always be a group of users who are resistant to change, and during a time of change they will be most vocal. If you listen to them you'll stagnate -- which is almost always the kiss-of-death for a company like Twitter. To be innovative you have to take risks and that includes the risk of angering certain people.
I can't count the number of times that the new interface has reported 'twitter is over capacity', 'you have already tweeted that' (when it wasn't true) and a whole pile of other errors, if it worked at all. Page load times of several minutes on a 10 Mbit connection on a very fast machine are ridiculous.
Of course you have to 'take risks to innovate'. But rolling out buggy and slow software is not innovation, especially not when it breaks web conventions (take a look at the new urls).
If you take risks, the risk isn't just that you'll piss people off... its that you'll create something that is worse or no better than what you already have.
I really am curious as to why the new interface works so absurdly badly.
It's not even a question of being a bit slow, the thing uses constantly 90% of my cpu (I'm using a low end netbook), which makes it technically unusable, and it's not like it does that much work. Hell, it just print a timeline.
The only thing missing from the mobile interface is a basic auto-refresh function.
I believe it's due to the fixed positioning used throughout the layout. Even on my iMac and MacBook Air it chugs when scrolling through just a page or two of statuses. Super, super annoying.
I also agree about the never-ending scrolling, it's horrible. I usually think "oh I'll just finish reading this page and then I'll stop" and then without noticing it loads another page ... and another ... and then it turns really slow and urrgh.
Definitely going to try the mobile version next time :)
I don't get the bitching about the new UI. What is he talking about when he says "pages that take several minutes to load"? Is he talking about the regular twitter.com UI? It loads in less than a second and is otherwise completely responsive.
Except when the API is overloaded, which is often. Then Twitter.com just spins for a long while and gives a message about trying again while failing to load your tweets at all.
In what is probably a related but separate revamp effort, the mobile site is no longer usable on my phone. It just spins and spins, and I'm not the only Android user that has this problem.
Not to mention what a pain it is to try to go back to where you were before which, while irritating on the desktop if you forget to open a new tab, is a significant disruption on the phone.
The old UI had its issues, but it was much faster than the new one. Issues I see on a daily with new Twitter:
- There're a lot of little weird inefficiencies if you use the keyboard - for instance, if you expand a tweet, space bar no longer works to continue scrolling down the page unless you tap over.
- Scrolling can be slowwww. Can't scroll back more than 3 hours or so in my timeline, without getting an infinite loading animation or no option to continue viewing at all. This was especially a pain for me when I was on PDT, it meant I basically couldn't catch up with the early EDT news unless I switched to my mobile client.
- "You've already tweeted that." "Sorry, we couldn't X, please try again later." and so on...
Then there's the search overhaul, which actually bummed me out a lot more:
- Now, search results continually default to "Top" instead of "All," requiring a manual change.
- Tweet translation's been removed. :(
- Interface suffers the same issues (infinite loading spinner) that plague the new Twitter interface. The old search interface was really stripped down and fast.
I love Twitter, it's been super-important to me both personally and for my business; but I really would pay a subscription fee to get some efficiency back into my daily morning Twitter routine (i.e., ++scroll-speed, at least 48 hours of search history, bring automated tweet translation back, multiple account support). $5/month would be a serious bargain, especially considering these features would give me an extra hour or more back every day.
It's not that new - I've been using this ever since twitter said they would close down the old interface and force the new one upon me. It's fast, nearly complete, and convenient.
It also doesn't have the incredibly annoying "endless page" scroll.
Certainly the "new" part of the title is full of irony, emphasizing the desire of people to get something else than the bloated, crawling, min_width=1024px, url-raping atrocity that is the new_twitter.
I also like how it runs separately from the standard Twitter servers. I can be logged into one account on twitter.com and another on m.twitter.com, and I've found m.twitter.com to be generally more reliable than twitter.com.
I was going to say this Twitter interface rant reminds me of all the people complaining every time Facebook changes their layout. I suspect Facebook now makes changes in smaller increments, since these complaints have gone down.
I don't actually dislike it overall in concept, but it feels very buggy to me in implementation. Sometimes it will just stop working entirely until I reload: clicking on a tweet to have a detail view slide out in the right panel will work for a while, then at some point I click a few times on a tweet and nothing happens. Not sure if some script is hanging or it's due to timeouts or what, but I notice this throughout the interface, which makes it feel very unpredictable.
I would like middle-click-to-open-in-new-tab to work more consistently as well.
I'm sure plenty do, but satisfied people don't complain, so you never hear from them.
Frankly, I don't use Twitter enough to be affected by their UI in general, but I strongly dislike the URL hacks. I think websites should stick to real URLs, and only use Javascript page changes if the new History methods are available.
I like it too. However, it is a little slow at times and I do get the "there was a problem sending this tweet" message a little too often.
It's particularly bad whenever you try to go through a long list of people you are following and try to unfollow lots of them. Takes an age to respond to clicking the unfollow button.
I like it as well, it has it's issues (any overhaul that large is going to have bugs relative to a design that's had significant time in production to uncover issues) and I'm always amazed that folks don't understand that if you maintain old UX indefinitely to placate a small majority of users, you end up creating technical debt that slows down product innovation.
I mostly use the same apps you do on a day-to-day basis -- but honestly you should try the site sometime. It's pretty sweet.
It's especially useful when you want to find new people to follow. You can poke around really easily, read conversations and see photos they've posted and who they follow, etc etc. It feels optimized for discovering new stuff.
I'd be interested to hear the decision making process that twitter used to implement the new interface. Were the changes driven by the users? What metric did they use to determine if the change was a success or not? Was it successful?
Agreed. I have been using this for the last couple months since I uninstalled my client on Windows (MetroTwit) at work and won't check my phone all the time, the manual refresh is very "on demand" and I love it.
+1 to the "WTF" comments. I don't seem to have these issues with new twitter being slow, or using 90% CPU, or failing, or any of these other complaints.
[+] [-] corin_|14 years ago|reply
I've seen it a couple of times on big community websites when people complained about a new design, and then a week later realised that just because it started off not feeling like the site they grew to love, it didn't mean it wasn't a huge improvement.
They key is that, after you force users to switch, it has to be good enough that they realise you were acting in their best interests - if you force them to switch to something that really is much worse, that's when it becomes a problem.
I was wondering: if someone used the Twitter API to create basically a clone of the original site, would that be against the Ts & Cs, and if not could this be got around somehow. For example if someone made it and open sourced it, I could host it myself with my own API key, and without marketing it anyone other than myself and my friends Twitter wouldn't know or care?
[+] [-] thaumaturgy|14 years ago|reply
In business, it almost always is.
If your user base is uncomfortable with significant changes to your design or interface, you should take that into account. Why are you changing the design or interface? Is it really improving their experience, or is it just because you like the new one better? Why not roll out a new design in lots of small changes over the course of a year or more, so that people don't tend to feel as disoriented?
You should keep in mind that a lot of people out there don't have the learned ability to glance at a screen and immediately pick out the relevant bits. Many of them deal with lots of different interfaces every day. When you radically change your design, for these people it's like having to learn a whole new site all over again.
[+] [-] jackowayed|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mailarchis|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] riledhel|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnorthrop|14 years ago|reply
This leads to a dangerous line of thinking. There will always be a group of users who are resistant to change, and during a time of change they will be most vocal. If you listen to them you'll stagnate -- which is almost always the kiss-of-death for a company like Twitter. To be innovative you have to take risks and that includes the risk of angering certain people.
[+] [-] 0x12|14 years ago|reply
I can't count the number of times that the new interface has reported 'twitter is over capacity', 'you have already tweeted that' (when it wasn't true) and a whole pile of other errors, if it worked at all. Page load times of several minutes on a 10 Mbit connection on a very fast machine are ridiculous.
Of course you have to 'take risks to innovate'. But rolling out buggy and slow software is not innovation, especially not when it breaks web conventions (take a look at the new urls).
[+] [-] true_religion|14 years ago|reply
If you take risks, the risk isn't just that you'll piss people off... its that you'll create something that is worse or no better than what you already have.
[+] [-] n3m6|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Wilya|14 years ago|reply
It's not even a question of being a bit slow, the thing uses constantly 90% of my cpu (I'm using a low end netbook), which makes it technically unusable, and it's not like it does that much work. Hell, it just print a timeline.
The only thing missing from the mobile interface is a basic auto-refresh function.
[+] [-] tintin|14 years ago|reply
Unlimited scrolling is nice, but not necessary. Dynamic loading of content is nice, but not necessary. And the list goes on...
The mobile website is what Twitter should be.
[+] [-] flyosity|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brown9-2|14 years ago|reply
I am the only one who has never seen problems like this with it?
[+] [-] tripzilch|14 years ago|reply
I also agree about the never-ending scrolling, it's horrible. I usually think "oh I'll just finish reading this page and then I'll stop" and then without noticing it loads another page ... and another ... and then it turns really slow and urrgh.
Definitely going to try the mobile version next time :)
[+] [-] john2x|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcromartie|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangrossman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eavc|14 years ago|reply
Not to mention what a pain it is to try to go back to where you were before which, while irritating on the desktop if you forget to open a new tab, is a significant disruption on the phone.
[+] [-] jen_h|14 years ago|reply
- There're a lot of little weird inefficiencies if you use the keyboard - for instance, if you expand a tweet, space bar no longer works to continue scrolling down the page unless you tap over.
- Scrolling can be slowwww. Can't scroll back more than 3 hours or so in my timeline, without getting an infinite loading animation or no option to continue viewing at all. This was especially a pain for me when I was on PDT, it meant I basically couldn't catch up with the early EDT news unless I switched to my mobile client.
- "You've already tweeted that." "Sorry, we couldn't X, please try again later." and so on...
Then there's the search overhaul, which actually bummed me out a lot more:
- Now, search results continually default to "Top" instead of "All," requiring a manual change.
- Tweet translation's been removed. :(
- Interface suffers the same issues (infinite loading spinner) that plague the new Twitter interface. The old search interface was really stripped down and fast.
I love Twitter, it's been super-important to me both personally and for my business; but I really would pay a subscription fee to get some efficiency back into my daily morning Twitter routine (i.e., ++scroll-speed, at least 48 hours of search history, bring automated tweet translation back, multiple account support). $5/month would be a serious bargain, especially considering these features would give me an extra hour or more back every day.
[+] [-] ColinWright|14 years ago|reply
It also doesn't have the incredibly annoying "endless page" scroll.
Much to be preferred.
[+] [-] lloeki|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] castewart|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leviathant|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingsidharth|14 years ago|reply
Sounds like one of those "Get 1 Million and facebook will revert back XYZ" Groups. Everyone has one. It's a good thing they are experimenting.
[+] [-] kokey|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamjustlooking|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _delirium|14 years ago|reply
I would like middle-click-to-open-in-new-tab to work more consistently as well.
[+] [-] icebraining|14 years ago|reply
Frankly, I don't use Twitter enough to be affected by their UI in general, but I strongly dislike the URL hacks. I think websites should stick to real URLs, and only use Javascript page changes if the new History methods are available.
[+] [-] tripzilch|14 years ago|reply
Thing is, if you got a new/fast computer, you don't notice this, and then yeah, the new interface is just fine.
Except that, for the functionality it provides, there's not really a good excuse for the page to be so slow.
[+] [-] Finbarr|14 years ago|reply
It's particularly bad whenever you try to go through a long list of people you are following and try to unfollow lots of them. Takes an age to respond to clicking the unfollow button.
[+] [-] tomkarlo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wgx|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thenduks|14 years ago|reply
It's especially useful when you want to find new people to follow. You can poke around really easily, read conversations and see photos they've posted and who they follow, etc etc. It feels optimized for discovering new stuff.
[+] [-] robjohnson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emp_|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wesnet|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masnick|14 years ago|reply
This would be good pinned to the status bar (OS X) with Fluid (http://fluidapp.com).
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhizome|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davedx|14 years ago|reply
Blazingly fast, Twitter? In another reality, maybe
[+] [-] Karunamon|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrywright|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] durga|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zakuzaa|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chadgeidel|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobarbazetc|14 years ago|reply
And way worse.
[+] [-] follower|14 years ago|reply