Twitter gets a new look
If you logged into Twitter tonight you probably noticed that things look a bit different. Overall the interface is cleaner and easier to navigate. Most of the changes are cosmetic, although the company hinted on its website that the redesign was done in part to accommodate as yet to be announced features.
Things you’ll notice (posted on the Twitter website):
Moving the tabs
The most significant change you’ll notice on the logged-in homepage (/home) is that we’ve moved the tabs that were on the top of the timeline to the right sidebar. We did this for a couple reasons. For one thing, it makes them larger targets and easier to access. But more importantly, it was an investment in the future. We plan to have more tabs, and we’d run out of room putting them along the top. This was the driving factor for this redesign, but you won’t see all the benefits until a future release (hopefully, very soon!).
Ajax for speed
When you click on the Home or @Replies tab when you’re already on that page, the updates are now refreshed via Ajax, instead of loading the whole page, which should be faster.Action icons: When you need them
At first you may wonder where the star and reply swoosh beside every update went. Hover over an update to see them show up.Lighter, Prettier, Simplified
Besides hiding the icons until you need them, we’ve done many things to try and make the look of the page less cluttered — like lightening the lines between posts and spacing things out more. Some things we’ve made smaller (like our logo), while other, more important things, we’ve made bigger (like the tabs and the Update button). Some things we’ve made the tough choice to get rid of all together (see below).
Click on this link to read the entire post from Twitter on all of the changes.
The company also acknowledged that it is impossible to hit every item on everyone’s wish list and they invited folks to provide feedback (via Twitter, of course) on what changes they’d like to see. According to Twitter, these changes are just the beginning.
What we haven’t done
This hardest thing about doing a redesign like this deciding what not to tackle. I’m fairly certain that much of the feedback to this will be, “What about…[your favorite feature request / annoyance].” Please be assured the changes we’ve made here aren’t the only things we want to (or will) change. They’re not even, necessarily, the most important. The scope of this project was limited to light-weight front-end work. We have whole other teams working on back-end changes and more fundamental functionality changes (which, as mentioned above, this is also laying the groundwork for).
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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 9:10 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
