Wednesday, July 1, 2009

New Twitter Features: Reviewing from the Positive Side of the Brain

A dear friend and Twitter marketer, contacted me late last night to voice concerns about my negative tone. I thought I had already had that conversation, but he probably doesn't "read me." No worries. So one of the pieces he pointed to was my recent trashing of the UX/UI changes on Twitter. I DID ping @stop and ask if he was the Creative Director responsible for the NEW TWITTER Friends and Followers pages. Here's what he said.

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Okay, so perhaps I was being mean, I don't sense that was my purpose, but I do understand online sarcasm and humor can often be confused for bitterness, anger, vendetta, whateva... So here goes my ALL GOOD review... Let's see how this rolls.

+++ THE ALL GOOD REVIEW: Thank goodness Twitter has made some needed upgrades to their UX.

So Twitter's got a new pull-down action menu for dispatching some useful tasks.

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Here we can see the new pull-down menu for taking action on followers and followees. With a simple click we can @, DM, Follow or Block any one. And this nifty feature is now available in the same flavor across all the "friends" or "followers" pages you visit. Even when looking at the "friends" or "followers" of other users. Nice! And convenient that you can see instantly, even without using the drop-down, that this person is "blocked" or "followed." [Oh heck, am I still following that silly old advertising agency that I used to work for. Let's see, CLICK: drop-down, PULL: Unfollow.] Nice!

So now let's look at the new and improved Followers and Friends pages.

Here is a shot of the "You Follow" page in LIST view.

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So this pretty much looks like the old "You Follow" page. And conveniently the same drop-down box is available here too. [I wish we could choose the number of tweeps to view per page, cause following 5,600 tweeps using 20 tweeps per page... well that's 280 pages of goodness I have to page through to edit and cull my list. Just a thought.]

And here's the greatly improved "Your Followers" page in EXPANDED view:

Picture 39

Here we can see that @stop and company have added a little contextual information with each tweep. So you can see the person's last tweet, very helpful when deciding if you want to reciprocally follow back. And again the nice BIG pull-down button. And also a handy, ADD button.

So there are just a few things missing from the new interface. I'm sure @stop and his group are already hard at work on the next iteration.

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1. I would like to see a RT option here. This must have been an oversight, cause that's such a simple fix.

2. I would also really like Twitter to add a "-!" Report Abusive Account feature. Where I can fast-track pornsters and scammers to the dustbin of Twitter Hades. And in the Usability department, here's one more suggestion.

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Maybe there would be a good case for a drop-down something like this:

View By List
  - 20 per page (default)
  - 50 per page (efficient)
  - 100 per page (uber user)

And for ultra.uber powerusers, there could be a TEXT LIST mode, with no pics. [That would be really fast, and I bet could relieve some of the server load on Twitter's cloud.]

Carry on @stop and company. Good work and if you need any further advice, feel free to ask. It's what I do, too.

Cheers,

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/twitter-good

The harsh-toned review from last night: Twitter UX Awakens: The NEW TWITTER Reviewed and Dissected for UX and

And the collection of Twitter Posts all in one place: The Twitter Way

 

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