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Comment by tvladeck | Hacker News Reader

I'm getting so frustrated with Twitter, as a shareholder and big believer in the company. I really think they need to be focusing on new services and experiences (actual new functionality!) with the content on their platform.

For example, many of their users are quite passive - why not improve the experience for the logged-out user? Twitter could be a great source of real-time news for everyone - not just heavy users of the platform.

In addition, did you know that if you paste a url into the search you can see the tweets that link to it? There are great conversations happening about published stories - yet that content has no way to get surfaced, really. I should be able to see the twitter conversations that are happening around every piece of content on the web, and I can't! That's crazy.

I get that design is important, but Twitter needs to innovate on its product. Rant over.

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The logged-out user experience (or even just the web/mobile experience) is really odd. Apart from a bar permanently blocking screen real estate telling you to signup/login, there are times where it simply doesn't work (not down, just not working), translations are mismatched/wrong, things like viewing an image.. simply don't work, and never have for me. It literally gives a black popup with nothing happening and this old iPhone 1.0 feel to it.

For a long time, they didn't even manage to provide an up to date version of someones tweets. Heres a realtime communication website, and yet when logged out, tweets would be at times delayed for hours and days.

The most common thing I struggle with as an accountless user is linking to tweets. It can take me a good while to find a link to a tweet I'm looking at.

The second most common problem I have is finding a user, even if I know their handle. It was hard to believe how difficult that was the first time I tried it (admittedly, vanity URLs have made this easier).

In the Twitter OSX app, if I want to find an account, my method is:

  Search icon
  Paste in handle, "@accountname"
  Receive list of people mentioning @accountname
  Click on one of them to view the account

Pretty insane that it wouldn't just give me that account name first followed by similar account names.

Another classic thing is the autocomplete on account names when writing a tweet. It will show me (and prioritise!) accounts I've never heard of and more often than not the account I'm actually wanting is last in the list.

Most Twitter apps (including the official one) support ⌘-U (command/apple-U), which is "Go to user..." - it autocompletes, though I imagine it's using the same suggestions that you mentioned. Definitely less steps, either way.

Oh boy, that's going to be helpful. Thanks!

As a user with an account, I also struggle with linking to tweets. The process right now is something like this:

1. See tweet in timeline, click the "expand" link in the lower left, or just some other blank spot in the tweet. 2. Hunt around until I see the non-obvious de-emphasized "details" link in light grey next to the date. 3. Click the "details" link and load the full page for the tweet. 4. Copy the link from the browser URL bar.

I don't know why they make it so hard and require me to load a whole other page and interrupt my timeline browsing flow. Annoyingly there's a "more" link on each tweet which I always end up checking anyway, and it doesn't have an option to copy a link to the tweet! You can "share via email" or "embed tweet" but neither of those gives you a useful URL you can just paste somewhere. The UI is a train wreck.

You can just click the date. Not obvious, I know.

you can also click or right click on the hour right next to the tweet which will give you a permalink to the tweet.

Obvious and discoverable. I never even realized the time was a link, and I use the twitter web UI every day.

really good point. There was a discussion on NPR the other day about how un-intuitive Twitter was and how most normal people just don't get even what a retweet is, what a hashtag is, or the whole reply system on Twitter.

For example the fact that if you start a tweet with @ it will not show up on your feed. Stuff like that.

There's also no way to search from the main page. I find myself typing "twitter.com/search" into my URL bar a lot.

do you mean the logged out main page? If it is any consolation you can't search Facebook logged out either.

Yeah, but Facebook kind of has different use cases. Unless you're really trying to do some form of "stalking" (I don't mean this literally), there's not much use for a search feature while logged out.

Twitter on the other hand is very useful to use when you're logged out. Plus Twitter DOES let logged out users search, with the exact same search abilities as any logged in user, but they simply hide the functionality until yo're logged in.

We can only assume they've had their entire engineering team fighting for weeks over the decision. There is no way they have a team of engineers focused on development of features, bugs etc and a separate team of designers, marketers or branding specialists who focus on the UI/UX, and other visual decisions like font choice, uh uh, no way I say, I say no way. They are way too small of a company to have dedicated designers.

Really? This is probably something a few designers put together who weren't busy on other projects. Companies like Twitter employ a lot of people working on multiple goals simultaneously. As a shareholder you should rest assured that they're not prioritizing font choice above all other business matters.

Sorry, but how does being a random shareholder imply that business is being conducted in the most efficient manner? Just because a company had an IPO doesn't mean it will make the most sensible decisions. I'm not saying Twitter is being irresponsible as I have zero knowledge of their organization internals.

I just meant that I (working in the software industry) know that something like a font choice is a small matter for a company (even though it might be a big deal to a few employees working the project). And I know that if they are re-assigning software engineers to work on choosing fonts and other design matters, employees would be quitting Twitter in large numbers (which hasn't happened).

(Note: I had updated my above comment grammatically to clarify that I'm referring to the original commenter as a shareholder, not myself).

I'd prefer that Twitter fix old functionality before changing typeface for the sake of change. Users can't even save a search from an iOS device using the official app or mobile view. Sheesh, search is Twitter's best feature.

It is easier to target ads at logged-in users, and collect meaningful data to track them.

They'll have a better chance at adding new users if they improve the experience for those not logged in, surely?

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