Twitter: A Clusterfuck of UI Mistakes

The 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...

Facebook'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.

I 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.

One 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.

What 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?

Another 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?

Twitter'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.

I 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.

The 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.

If 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.

Twitter'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.

Yup, 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.

Recently 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.

> 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.

Twitter 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.

Yep, 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 :(.

Twitter 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.

This is what happens when the user is not the customer.

It's not just an issue with Twitter. Every time someone visits Canada's Wonderland I get tagged in an Instagram photo.

What's the difference between @foo and #foo? Enough said.

Why is twitter still a thing?

It adds no value to my life and is basically a glorified gossip rag at this point.

I am in opposite thinking, that they have great UI, but sure everything can be improved

So 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)