Is Twitter Testing New Designs?

Published in April 1st, 2009

This morning I noticed that my Twitter home page looked a little different. Please ignore my choice in color schemes, as I tend to like the dark background I have. If you look closely at the image, or click to see the full size image, you will notice several differences:

The search bar is no longer at the top, but on the side under the home, @replies and other navigation items.
The trending keywords are beneath the search bar.
The “selected” navigation item does not have a solid background color, but just the little triangle and a different colored font.

Compare this to the old version of the user interface:

The old version has been around for quite some time, and Twitter has been in need of some upgrades. However, are these design tweaks worthwhile? I am not sure if they really affect what I do, but I know I wish they would focus on more functionality. The design has always been fairly simple because it had few features to support. Maybe these design changes are a precursor to something bigger. We can always hope.

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5 users responded in " Is Twitter Testing New Designs? "

The Lovable Rogue said, in April 1st, 2009 at 10:39 AM

hey there,
To be honest, I’ve been somewhat absent from Twitter over the past few months, so I hadn’t actually noticed these changes. You suggest that theys are somewhat simplistic, but then isn’t that the beauty of the platform? Granted, some further functionality would be fantastic, but I have always been reasonably pleased with Twitter as a platform. All too often, sites continue to develop their tools, overly complicatin manyg a service that is inherently simple. I think it would be a shame if Twitter compromised its simplicity in pursuit of functionality.

TLR

robdiana said, in April 1st, 2009 at 10:58 AM

TLR

I am not asking for huge amounts of functionality. But simple things like groups or personal lists would be nice. They just reworked the replies to be “mentions” in the past week, but it had been a feature of many of the desktop apps for ages. Design is something that can have simple changes with “big” results.

Atul said, in April 1st, 2009 at 12:35 PM

They also changed the URL to http://twitter.com/timeline/home from http://twitter.com/home. Not clear why they did that as well.

robdiana said, in April 1st, 2009 at 12:41 PM

Atul,

I did notice that after I wrote this post. I have a feeling that something bigger is coming, and this is just a precursor to it.

Twitter Trackbacks for Is Twitter Testing New Designs? | Regular Geek [regulargeek.com] on Topsy.com said, in August 31st, 2009 at 6:34 AM

[...] Is Twitter Testing New Designs? | Regular Geek regulargeek.com/2009/04/01/is-twitter-testing-new-designs – view page – cached This morning I noticed that my Twitter home page looked a little different. If you look closely you will notice several differences. The old version has been around for quite some time, and Twitter has been in need of some upgrades. However, are these design tweaks worthwhile? — From the page [...]

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Is Twitter Testing New Designs?

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