User Interface of the Day #8: Twitter

Design UI Design Fundamentals

Social networking site twitter.com has created quite the splash this year. Millions of people worldwide have answered the question, “What are you doing right now?,” millions of times, all for the amusement of and desire to connect with friends, family members, and complete strangers. You can Twitter just on your computer, or you can take it mobile and use the service on your cell phone. Twitter pithy messages that tell your pals where you are, what you’re doing, or what you’re experiencing, or simply use it to find someone at a party. What do the Humanoids think about Twitter? Find out below.

Andrew Wilson

What’s Cool: The real simplicity of the update button with the box and limited number of characters is well-done, as is the big, obvious counter telling you how many characters you have left (given the constraint).

What’s Not Cool: I knew it was possible to directly send and reply to items, but couldn’t figure out how to do it; even when you know about this capability, it is incredibly inconvenient to use. Meanwhile, the user interface for finding and following people was sad: I searched for toolness (Atul’s Twitter ID) and turned up thousands of results. I expected an exact match to come up first, and it didn’t.

When I used GTalk to message for help, Twitter sent back some help text, including a list of commands. I was confused, so I sent some invalid help commands which subsequently showed up as my status message. This is confusing, entirely undiscoverable, and undocumented. It was so weird that there was a default — that you could send malformed commands, and Twitter would just update your status without giving you an error message. There shouldn’t be a default action.

So? If your goal is to send an IM to the Internet, or to your friends, then this is the tool for you. As for me, broadcast-publishing little snippets of thought doesn’t seem to be a useful way to communicate. To save scraps of ideas, or to notify friends of something, I find that emailing is much more useful.

Of course, I could lose my whole life if I let myself buy into Twitter, so I deliberately don’t let myself and find every reason not to. If I did buy into it, I would surely fall into its dark, cavernous hole very quickly.

Atul Varma

What’s Cool: Obviously, something like Twitter is good for communicating with friends who live elsewhere, or for those moments when I’m looking at an interesting web page and want to make note of it. Limiting you to just 140 characters per post limits the kinds of things you can communicate, which can be good; I don’t feel pressured to present something polished, but instead feel free to post something like a random thought or url. The no-pressure aspect makes me more likely to post on Twitter than I would on a blog, which requires more time and effort.

I also like that you can choose to have your posts private or viewable only by authorized followers. The publish and subscribe options enable me to decide which people’s comment streams to follow. Finally, regardless of whether someone is following me, or vice versa, it’s always available; I don’t have to revisit the site to follow people.

What’s Not Cool: It seemed like the site was overloaded with traffic. Also, there’s a missed synchronization issue. It seemed like it was using Ajax for a number of things, and in some cases the Ajax wasn’t responding. For example, I started to follow someone and clicked the “follow” button, and the background of their box turned blue; this seemed to indicate that I was following that person as of that moment, but then a recycling icon popped up on the screen and went on for several minutes. Hitting “refresh” produced the same page, without the recycling icon, but the page still said “follow,” and the background was blue. I clicked yet again, and I think it removed me.

So? In general, it seems that Twitter is uniting various modes of communication: phones, chats, emails, etc. It forms a nexus of all of these different communication methods, and you don’t constantly have to go to it — you just sign in, and then you’re connected. It’s compatible with whatever comm method you prefer.

One more thing: It would be nice to have an undo function to instantly undo errors.

Jono DiCarlo

What’s Cool: I thought the interface itself was simple and easy to figure out. I even hooked Twitter up to my cell phone and tried typing in a message with the tiny number keys, like all the popular kids are doing these days, and it was as painless as I could have hoped for. (Text-entry on a cell phone is the worst interface ever, but that’s not Twitter’s fault.) I don’t have much else to say because everything worked just how I expected it to — the sign of a good interface.

What’s Not Cool: Under the “explore” link is a “Block” visualization, which is supposed to show an animated 3D graph of your friends and neighbors. I thought it would be cool, but instead it was extremely confusing. I couldn’t figure out how I was supposed to read it, why the same posts appeared so many times, or why some squares were shown on a higher or lower level that made them disappear off the edges of my screen. “Block” needs to be completely redone or dropped.

But the real question with Twitter is not whether it’s a good human-computer interface; the question is whether it’s a good human-human interface. Maybe I’m just a cranky old Luddite, because I don’t understand the point of “facebooking” or “texting.” I keep my cell phone turned off whenever possible. So, I certainly don’t see the point of Twitter. It seems like you’re just sending text messages to the Internet-at-large in the hopes that someone might be interested. I already have a blog for doing that. I guess it’s the aggregation aspect, the remote-updating aspect, and the enforced brevity which distinguish Twitter from blogging. It might be that I don’t find social networking sites useful because I already have too many methods of communication: Email, blogging, instant-messaging and telephone constitute four methods, in addition to “talking to people in person” (what I really prefer to do, whenever possible). Between all of those methods, I don’t feel like social-networking sites fill a void, but instead introduce even more redundancy, time-wasting, and useless information to my life. But some people obviously feel differently, and if they find a use for Twitter, more power to them.

So? McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.” Well, apparently if the medium is “140 character text broadcast,” then the message is, “I just killed that fly that was bothering me two hours ago.”

Lauri Apple

What’s Cool: It’s very easy to dive right in and start using Twitter. It’s cool that you can scroll over someone’s ID button and their name pops up; that’s convenient, as it seems that many people don’t upload their own photos. Trying to figure out who was who, with nothing to go on except the popular default ID image, would take hours. Also, I like the little trash icons under each message, which enable you to delete messages quickly and easily.

What’s Not Cool: The trash icon is very small! Also, what is the point of the star icon? You can give yourself a gold star, for whatever reason. Big deal.

So? Like Jono, I must be a Luddite as well, because I don’t understand at all why anyone who is not a. a reporter; b. looking for breaking news about something like a devastating brush fire; or c. either in charge of posting, or just deeply interested in, fire or police department activity logs would want to use something like this Twittarded service. Of course, this is coming from someone who refuses to text message, doesn’t use AIM or any other similar system outside of my workplace, and wouldn’t even own a cell phone if I didn’t have to. Too many pings, rings and dings really harsh my mellow. So from my point of view, the desire to use something like Twitter seems strange at best, and unhealthy/borderline pathological at worst. The service promotes the “I need attention and some way to justify how boring my life is by telling you about the banal things I’m doing right now” mentality that has become so pervasive. What drives this desire to constantly and continuously communicate the minutiae of daily life with other people? What do other people have to gain by my informing them that I am, say, brushing my teeth with Crest toothpaste, and that it feels nice and tingly? What benefit do I offer society by reporting, in 140 characters or less, that it is raining where I live? Isn’t there enough useless information in the world? Aren’t we on our cell phones and computers too much as it is?

After using Twitter, I want to make a Website that consists of a plain white screen. The site does not allow you to do or communicate anything — all you can do is just look at it and develop an overwhelming feeling of boredom that will hopefully inspire you to get up and express yourself in the three-dimensional world.