Twitters new and blazingly fast interface
jacquesmattheij.com
jacquesmattheij.com
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?
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.
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).
Therefore, "Slower+buggy is not an improvement," took a minute to parse.
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.
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.
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.
I am the only one who has never seen problems like this with it?
Especially if you consider what Twitter is. It is not a 1080p streaming site like Youtube (which works fine btw), it is not some complicated Office suite like Google Docs (which works fine btw), it is just a site that displays short messages on my computer screen. I don't see a reason why Twitter even needs Javascript at all.
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 :)
When I read about this guy seeing over a minute page loads, all I could think was, something is wrong with your computer or network dude.
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.
- 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 also doesn't have the incredibly annoying "endless page" scroll.
Much to be preferred.
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.
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.
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 would like middle-click-to-open-in-new-tab to work more consistently as well.
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.
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.
This would be good pinned to the status bar (OS X) with Fluid (http://fluidapp.com).
Blazingly fast, Twitter? In another reality, maybe
And way worse.