Ask HN: Has Twitter's latest UI change worked for you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has Twitter's latest UI change worked for you?

4 pointsColinWright7 comments

Twitter has changed their appearance again, and broken several things for me. Has anyone else had their "User Experience" broken by this?

And here's a question: if you provide a service via a web interface, how much testing should you do before making a change? What browser/OS combinations should you test, and how should you test them?

For reference, I'm using Firefox 13 on Ubuntu 12 here. It's also broken on a much earlier version of Firefox that I'm using on a netbook running a bespoke version of Linux.

So HNers

* How much testing do you do?

* How much testing do you do?

And if anyone from Twitter is here: You've broken my experience. Again.

View on HN

Examples of some of the things that are now changed, sub-optimal, or just plain broken:

* External links no longer appear in the actual tweet, you now need to click on the tweet to see the link to click to get to the item. Two clicks instead of just the one.

* A middle-click doesn't work any more - I constantly use that to open things in a new tab so I can then rapidly run through multiple conversations and links. Not any more, they rigorously enforce the inefficient, linear experience.

* You now need to click to get more tweets, and it lengthens the existing page, rather than loading a new one. That rapidly becomes unusable on my mobile device.

* It no longer indicates if a given tweet is part of a conversation, so now you have to click on the tweet, and it flash loads the conversation, if it exists, taking away my ability to control how much stuff I download.

* The "search" function does not turn up every instance. For example, this search:

https://mobile.twitter.com/search/ColinTheMathmo

... does not find this mention:

https://mobile.twitter.com/noodlemaz/status/2180626418962350...

* While composing a tweet I now can't use the mouse to select, cut and paste text, and the END and HOME keys don't do anything. They used to.

... and so on.

Bloody annoying.

When Twitter starting "app-ing" their pages, I gave up on them. I now access my account once or twice a year to address something very specific.

Too many hoops, and this old dog gets tired and goes somewhere else.

And sooner or later, "the kids" are going to discover the joy of "retro" and bail on the UI BS, as well -- my personal speculation.

Honestly it hardly made any difference for me. The only thing about the latest update that bugs me is now the birdie is tilted more upwards than he was before.

I don't notice any changes, do you have a screenshot?

Before: http://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/Tw0.png

After: http://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/Tw1.png

It doesn't load at all on my netbook. I'm trying to document all the differences and what doesn't work, but I'm just overwhelmed by the brokenness, and don't really know where to start. I wasn't expecting this, so I don't have many examples of the previous version to compare against.

people use the twitter website?

People ask snarky, rhetorical, non-constructive questions on HN?

However, to answer your implicit question:

I regularly use 8 different platforms, some of which I have no control over, and some of which don't have native Twitter apps. To use the Twitter web site means - correction, meant - that I have - correction, had - a single, consistent, usable interface that worked reasonably efficiently and reasonably effectively on all of them.

So yes, I use - correction, used - the Twitter web site.

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