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In January, the After the second year of @ realDonaldTrump, shortly after the $ 20 million fine, Elon Musk and the cancellation of Kevin Hart's tour for the Oscars were canceled due to controversial tweets. 10 days of silent meditation In Myanmar, for which he praised the food and beauty of the monasteries, but neglected to mention the ongoing regional genocide, Twitter made it clear that some things were going to change.
Just not the tweets. Although the company spent most of the year promoting "healthy conversations," it was not interested in putting the screws to its users. The debates, the disagreements, the occasional controversies about the explosion, that's what allowed Twitter to become Twitter. No, instead, Twitter has decided to change from the outside. It was time to give the experience to use Twitter a makeover.
A redesign of the Twitter website was long overdue. The desktop interface had not been refreshed for seven years and the technology stack was so old that it was difficult for engineering to make improvements. The team had begun remodeling its website in 2017 and had it open to beta in September 2018. In January, it was time to show more users what the new Twitter would look like .
But as soon as Twitter invited people to choose a prototype of the new design …a new twitter.com was coming!The peanut gallery started weighing, and not quite kindly. What could Twitter do to improve its web design? "Delete it. ""Editing button. ""ALL WE WANT IS A CHANGE BUTTON. ""Did you get rid of the Nazis?""Eh, uglySuggested a user, perhaps in a charitable way, "but I do not think that's a big problem."
For the Twitter design team, none of this was surprising. "We used to launch a feature, search for it, and put it on the screen to show the tweets," says Biz Stone, a co-founder of Twitter, who joined the company two years ago. "We would be like, Champagne?" And then it would be like, "Oh, maybe we should not.
The design team of Twitter has therefore chosen to proceed with caution for the new design of the office. The January preview was only a warning. A small percentage of Twitter users could choose to participate in a series of design experiments, but nothing was definitive, reactions were welcome and no one had received a new design. And these "experiences"? Nothing explosive. Twitter just wanted to know how its users would interact with bookmarks, dark mode or a search bar moved to another place on the page.
"Our goal is to serve the public conversation." "Once that became clear, it was like, wait a minute, how do we do that?"
Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter
Today, Twitter is rolling out the new website for absolutely everyone. Those who see it (or those who already own it) can find the new design refreshing in its subtlety. Some changes have been made to the new three-column design, and the site is noticeably faster, but there are not many drastic updates. (No, there is still no edit button.) That's Twitter's goal.
"Some are subtle, but largely consist of a simplification of design," says Mike Kruzeniski, senior director of product design on Twitter. "We are trying to find the right places to be daring again, but it's about restoring the basics. Start with the best things and build from there.
This foundation will prove important for Twitter. The redesign comes at a time when society is beginning to revise its hate and harassment policies on the platform and relies more on human moderators to carry out the janitorial tasks necessary to maintain the site. Much remains to be done to clean the toxic swamp. In the meantime, Twitter is planting a community garden.
Redesigning the Web is not just about making the place look better. It's also about sending a message to users: Twitter listens to what you want, even if it does not always look like you.
From left to right, Biz Stone, Bryan Haggerty and Mike Kruzeniski.
Samantha Cooper
In the beginning days of Twitter, design decisions were not so badly made that they were never made. "We were working just as fast as we could," says Stone. "We were not trying to make it look good."
And that showed. At launch, Twitter's design set out the company's name in a fluo-green font that looked like flubber. (Stone himself designed a large part of the first website and apologized for it, only at the time, 30 people were on Twitter, he told the defense.) to put a follower account in the user biography? Stone hardly thought of it. "We were just fighting to stay alive," he says.
Over time, and with the addition of a real team of designers, Twitter has devoted more time to intentional design. He observed his users finding creative ways to retweet or tag posts, and then built-in fixes to support those behaviors. He has experienced new ways to view news, find events, and share moments of your life with your friends.
But along the way, Twitter has had to face existential questions, often shaped by the way it presents itself. What exactly is Twitter? Who is it for? How should it be used – and more recently, should it even exist?
"Sometimes we fight the problem, really, for what group of people?" Says Kruzeniski. "Is it about your friends? Is it for your family? Is it for the people you would like to know? Or your Internet friends? Twitter has responded to these questions differently at different points in its history, and its design has tended to emphasize the identity it assumed at the time. He collected news information in his own column or tried to create the Twitter home page to search for events. "At different times, it was as if Twitter was an event. No, Twitter is a news, "says Kruzeniski.
What the design team is saying now is that Twitter is a conversation tool. The best stories on Twitter – those on the winds of the Arab Spring or NBA fanatics talking about Kevin Durant or stories like your personal adventures in which you are chosen as Beyoncé's assistant – have to do with people find like-minded users and respond to each other in real time.
"Internally, we call this project" Delight. "One of the things we're trying to do is make sure it's a fun experience for users."
Jesar Shah, product manager at the redesign of Twitter.com
The user interface is the membrane between Twitter engineers and its users; the people who build the platform and the people who use it. The Twitter design team has therefore tried to make choices that encourage people to do what is the strength of Twitter: the formation of niche communities, the ability to talk to leaders and celebrities of the world, the easy to find groups of like-minded people.
"Our goal is to serve the public conversation," says Stone. "Once that became clear, it was like waiting a minute. How are we doing this?
The new Twitter.com address this issue seriously, so carefully. He has made some judicious adjustments to the user interface and the team has rebuilt the entire technology stack of the website to facilitate the updating of the data.
The navigation icons have migrated to the left and the composition area, indicating at any time "What's going on?", Is now in the foreground, above the stream of tweets. You can now save your tweets in bookmarks, for later referencing. On the right, the search bar is more visible than the list of evolution topics.
The new version of Twitter.com places navigation icons on the left, allowing easier access to bookmarks and lists. The search bar is more prominently on the right.
"Users use Twitter a lot on their desktops to search for information, which is usually tied to their interests," says Jesar Shah, website redesign manager. "So we are trying to simplify things for Internet users and exploit these new spaces created on the site by completing their main navigation experience." It is a matter of going through the search and exploration tabs more obviously for signage purposes. what's the use of Twitter: find your Internet tribe.
There is a new profile button in the left sidebar, and it's easy to switch accounts. "There have been a lot of global comments on this," says Shah. In Japan, one of Twitter's most important markets, many users were creating different accounts for different interests. "So they'll have a food account, then another travel account and another TV account, or even a specific program. The ability to access it easily, no matter what device you're on, is something we've heard a lot about, and it's one of the most requested feature requests in a long time. "
The Twitter website is now more customizable. You can change the size of your text, choose one of the many accent colors, and activate one of Twitter's new dark modes. "Customization and customization are things we hope to see across the product," says Ashlie Ford, the product designer who led the redesign of Twitter.com.
The redesign supports two new options for dark mode: "dimmed" switches the theme to dark gray and "off" makes the black background true.
Twitter has envisioned more daring ideas, such as removing tweets statistics, for example. twttr, a prototyping application for these and other experiments. But the redesign of the website is mainly focused on establishing the "foundations" of a future Twitter. And slowing it down is important. "When we started experimenting, we opted for this option," says Shah. "We just make sure we are confident in the experience we offer. One of our principles is: "Be rigorous, make the right choices". It's around experimentation. Since we are a global company, it is our responsibility to understand the needs of all. "
To this end, Shah, Ford and the team have created a survey to allow Twitter users to give their opinion on the design. He has received more than 200,000 submissions from around the world. Ford spent weeks analyzing them, using translation services to access those from non-English speaking countries. "People do not really think we read them, but we are," she says.
Arielle Pardes covers personal technology, social media and culture for WIRED.
As proof, it points to one of the new features: a tool that places an emoji keyboard in the desktop composition box. "At first, I thought we did not need an emoji picker at the moment. There is a workaround for this, "she says. "But it was the # 1 reaction we heard about what people wanted, by landslide.
The customizations allow users to change the text size, activate one of Twitter's new dark modes and choose one of the many accent colors of the new Twitter.com site. .
Features like these may seem like small potatoes. But for Twitter, bringing some of the fantasy back to the design of the website was a central goal.
"Internally, we call this project" Delight, "says Shah. "One of the things we try to do is make this experience enjoyable for users. We want to make sure that people come back often and that they can achieve what they want to achieve on Twitter.com. "
From left to right, Ashlie Ford, Marina Zhou and Jesar Shah. The women's trio led the first redesign of Twitter.com in seven years.
Twitter was 13 years old this year, and it's hard to imagine a period of its history with less fun. The platform has become an arena for internal political struggles, a place where @realDonaldTrump commands both a huge audience and denounces Twitter's discrimination against conservatives. There are issues of misinformation, harassment, "dehumanizing speech" and simply having a consistent public conversation. Earlier this year at the TED conference, curator Chris Anderson compared Twitter to the Titanic heading straight for the iceberg. In other words: a ship about to sink.
Design can not change all that. But Twitter thinks it can at least help define what Twitter is and start addressing some of these questions about its identity.
"Previously, as a business, we had trouble because if you ask Twitter users why they use Twitter, you will get a thousand different answers," says Kruzeniski. "We used to think that maybe it was bad. But I think it's a wonderful thing. We are now trying to better help you find your specific interests and put you in touch with these topics and interests. "
This change of mentality seems to be happening everywhere on Twitter. The whole society seems to be redefining itself, until the headquarters, which began a major remodeling last year. Where the desk once resembled a "birdhouse" in shades of blue and wood, it is now cleaner and more modern. And the walls are full of murals depicting the communities that thrive on the platform: Black Twitter, NBA Twitter, Celebrity Twitter.
Browse any of the renovated parts of the office and you get a clear message: Twitter is about people, not the product. Now, the company hopes that this message will also pass on its website.
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