
Twitter: A Clusterfuck of UI Mistakes - notgood
http://ivanca.tumblr.com/post/150243684283/twitter-is-a-clusterfuck-of-ui-mistakes
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jakobegger
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...

~~~
throwanem
Click on the date. It'll reveal the thread.

Who doesn't love a discoverable UI, right?

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dawnerd
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.

~~~
joe_the_user
Certainly, Facebook has UI problems but I think there's more going on here.

The thing about the Twitter UI isn't just that it's awkward or ugly but that
it makes the platform itself itself bad - bad as in making-the-world-a-worse-
place bad.

When people can't ignore references to themselves, when they can only reply
with short retorts, it turns Twitter into the shallow, ugly, uncivil platform
that it currently is.

~~~
nailer
Or you just make a funny joke and get bored of getting 'lol,' reply
notifications you reconsider making such awesome content

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bonoboTP
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.

~~~
intoverflow2
> Neil deGrasse Tyson or Richard Dawkins

Twitter actually ruined my opinion on these individuals.

Neil deGrasse Tyson writing smug bitchy tweets about slight inaccuracies in
Hollywood sci-fi movies. Painted him in an entirely different light to me

Richard Dawkins tweet after tweet of him just arguing with stupid trolls,
you're supposed to be a respected academic yet here you are wrestling pigs in
the mud because for some reason you feel you have to win every argument.

~~~
namaemuta
> Richard Dawkins tweet after tweet of him just arguing with stupid trolls,
> you're supposed to be a respected academic yet here you are wrestling pigs
> in the mud because for some reason you feel you have to win every argument.

The world is full of "stupid trolls". If you ignore them bizarre things would
happen like people starting to believe AGAIN that the world is flat.

~~~
szatkus
I think that there are enough of internet warriors that someone like Dawkins
doesn't have to involve in those arguments.

Also making someone change his mind on the internet most of the times is close
to impossible, so it's usually pointless.

~~~
namaemuta
It's not only that. People making searches can end up finding those tweets. If
the only thing that they see is the wrong statement of trolls, they can think
that those statements are true. On internet, repetition is assumed as real so
if only the wrong things are repeated, then people will accept them as truth.

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p333347
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.

~~~
nerdponx
I don't think this is a bug. In the endless quest for eyeballs, they must keep
your attention trained on the latest thing. Long attention spans lead to
reading articles offsite, and that would reduce eyeball capture...

Am I being too cynical here?

~~~
raihansaputra
It probably begins as a bug, but left it there by the reasons you mentioned.
Or saw it as good enough and doesn't care about users who wants to know more
than what happened in the last day/week/month.

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kbody
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?

~~~
inthewoods
This - I often wonder what they hell they are doing all day. Maybe when they
first joined they thought they could change things and did solid work, but
after it becomes clear that no one is going to change anything, do you just
using your time for freelance work?

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the_common_man
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?

~~~
pjc50
That's OK, because the web interface resizes everything to the same size. It's
unreasonably hard to click through to a fullscreen "just the jpg ma'am" view.

~~~
the_common_man
Are you saying the web interface resizes all images to the same size? It
doesn't, that's my point.

~~~
pjc50
The web interface for reading tweets puts everything in "cards", so regardless
of the size when you uploaded it it gets resized into the card on display.
Unless you right-click-view-image.

(Just realised - do you mean size in bytes or size in pixels?)

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throwanem
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.

~~~
d33
I'd argue that you'd call any UI "quite good" after getting used to them. I
remember that my first steps with Twitter feel terrible and actually that is
sometimes still in the case after browsing it for a longer while.

~~~
throwanem
That's kind of the joke. It's not sold as being a megaphone, but when you try
to actually use it, you discover that's the only thing it manages not to be
terrible at.

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xg15
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.

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Sylos
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.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
I'm not sure you can even do that on desktop Twitter: if you can, I've never
found a way to do so. I always end up right-clicking 'Open in new tab'
instead.

~~~
huskyr
Yes, this is very annoying indeed. Especially if people post comics or images
with lots of detail: there's no way to get the full picture. The only way i
know is right clicking and selecting 'open image in new tab', which is a hack.

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huskyr
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.

~~~
spapin
Have you tried tweetdeck
([http://tweetdeck.twitter.com](http://tweetdeck.twitter.com))? It allows to
share an account without disclosing its password.

~~~
huskyr
Yeah, i know Tweetdeck does that. But then everyone needs to use Tweetdeck,
which doesn't have apps on mobile.

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julianpye
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.

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Udo_Schmitz
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.

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martin-adams
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.

~~~
RileyKyeden
People don't realize how it looks on the receiving end. A person @ name
searching you will only see tweets, then add on to the flood with "well it's
only a few tweets, how is this harassment?". They don't see the flood of
retweet/favorite notifications from those mentions.

I had this happen not too long ago when a comedian misunderstood something I
said and went on a very public rant at me:
[https://medium.com/@RileyKyeden/jen-kirkman-is-your-
problema...](https://medium.com/@RileyKyeden/jen-kirkman-is-your-problematic-
fave-807e7eefa668)

It was only a few tweets, but it produced hundreds of notifications from the
original tweets, replies to quote retweets[1] (and favorite/retweet
notifications on those), and replies from other famous people whose feeds are
watched closely by fans.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/twitter/status/742749353689780224](https://twitter.com/twitter/status/742749353689780224)

~~~
martin-adams
Yep, I can totally emphasise what you went though and it's very hard to put
under control.

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JohnDoe365
> 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.

~~~
cowsandmilk
that has nothing to do with what is discussed.

Person with 100k followers accidentally @mentions you. For the next month,
your notifications tab will be filled with people retweeting and replying to
that tweet. And then random notifications every couple weeks for years related
to that tweet.

This has nothing to do with ads.

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wldcordeiro
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.

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thejosh
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 :(.

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teaneedz
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.

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

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

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

~~~
jsemrau
@foo refers to a user and #foo to a topic. What's the problem?

~~~
talmand
Seems the problem might be a lack of understanding that @ and # are two
different characters that might have different meanings.

Kind of like how + and - have different meanings, complete opposites actually,
but people just get them confused all the time.

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gjolund
Why is twitter still a thing?

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

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

~~~
hackaflocka
"Hello green username."

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okket
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)

~~~
Grue3
Twitter has way worse UI than Reddit or Amazon. It's flashy and barely
functional, as opposed to crude but extremely functional. Whereas reddit pages
load instantly, any Twitter page is a 10 megabytes-sized blob of Javascript
that slows your browser to a crawl.

~~~
Stratoscope
Reddit is working hard to catch up to Twitter. Have you tried their new mobile
site? It's the worst user experience I've encountered in quite a while.

When I go to any page on the site, I get a blank page with an alien in the
middle. Quite some time later, the content actually loads. If I tap a link and
then go back, it goes through this all over again - and then it doesn't go
back to the same scroll position but some arbitrary place.

Finally I found a menu option that let me get the desktop Reddit site. I kept
trying Chrome's "Request desktop site" but it didn't work. Turned out I had to
use a setting in the Reddit mobile site's own menu for this.

The desktop site is a huge improvement, but with major flaws of its own. The
font sizing on mobile is fairly ridiculous - huge page titles and minuscule
comment/etc. links - but at least the pages load fast and it behaves like a
normal website.

What in the world are they thinking with this new mobile site? If they only
fixed up the font sizing in the desktop site it would be perfectly usable on
mobile - and _much_ better than their mobile version.

~~~
ansible
Yeah, I'm not too happy with the new mobile version of Reddit. I still use the
compact view [1] on my phone, which works fine for everything except
moderation. On my tablet I just use the desktop view.

[1] [http://reddit.com/.compact](http://reddit.com/.compact)

