twitter-disordesign

YOUTUBE Ocd_rRgY3-I Twitter Disordesign credits and copyright belong to Twitter, Joy Divison and AI mixing by Rave at MIT.

Twitter recently pushed its first desktop redesign in 7 years. Wired covered the backstory. The redesign changed both the client to a common desktop/mobile webapp based PWA (progressive web app) on responsive web technologies and service workers i.e generally in this pattern a cached version of the web app uses service workers in the web browsers cache for off line usage.

Additionally Twitter has been under mounting pressure to attenuate harmful speech and increase opportunities to insert personalized digital adverts into to its tweet steam. Twitter selected 3 women designers to accomplish the requirements. page .

My own experience, based on 3 redesigns of Google News, its takes me about 1 week to get used to a redesign. I learned about HCI (human computer interaction) via talks at PARC and Stanford by practitioners such as Marissa Mayer, Ed Chi and Peter Norvig via BayCHI.org.

These experts use both A/B testing and interaction design to help users learn new features by using Interstitials.

In my case I was introduced to the Twitter Redesign over 7 days, gradually the new client replace the old one over about 7 days, this allows for the eyes attention to effectively develop Banner Blindness . i.e mentally detune parts of the UI that I do not wish to pay attention to such as the BOLD left menu text, while paying attention to tweet content in middle column, and ignore 'Trends for You' in third column (treating columns as banners).

I feel that Twitter and Google current cohorts of web designers have forgotten many of the HCI lessons from earlier generations such as Marissa Mayer, who helped Google ascend to prominence on the web. Many on twitter have provided negative feedback, see hashtag #TwitterRedesign.

The 2020 Democratic Party presidential debates highlighted the biggest difference, static over real-time tweet streaming. i.e between this Twitter Redesign and Twitter's original design by Jack (insert Jack's sketches here). The new design is static and requires user interaction to load new tweets. Compare with TweetDeck, that will stream the Twitter firehouse in near real-time.

The Gillmor Gang lead by Steve Gillmor developed high-know at the intersection of real-time and attention trust. I wonder what the old Gillmor Gang would say about current web redesigns now being rolled out?