You remember New Coke? Coca-Cola's 1985 product and marketing disaster? Twitter's recent re-refresh feels like the start of a retelling of this story.
Everything is working great! It must be time to mess with the formula!
-- probably said by some Coke / Twitter executive
I won't rehash the functional changes - that's been done best by the internet. See Daring Fireball for a great run-down of complaints about this "conceptual rethinking of Twitter". Or see your tweet stream.
But since I've just labored over an Android UX presentation, I think its worth a look at the choices made for the new Android Twitter client UI in light of Android UX patterns, and a consideration of their motivations.
Ok, first I must concede Android UX is a moving target. Dashboards? That's so 2010. Action Bar and multiple-panel layouts are what the cool kids are into these days. But this isn't just fashion, its Android's UX reboot to tackle tablets, and the wide range of device formats.
Now consider a few screenshots:
Android Twitter Classic (last version before update):
Android New Twitter:
For comparison, iPhone Twitter:
And finally New Twitter on the Galaxy Tab 10 Inch Tablet:
Consistency, at the expense of standard UX and affordances of the native platform. I think consistency between apps on a platform is more important than consistency between apps from the same developer on two platforms. Few people use both iOS and Android interchangably.
This is not just for visual look.
Each mobile platform includes unique affordances for common behavior... How to navigate, how search is achieved, where high-priority actions are found, where lower-priority actions are found, how content is shared... Android UI Patterns uses Ikea's recent fail to illustrate this principle. This is largely where New Twitter falls short.
New Twitter on Android fails to utilize a few key conventions for Android UX and unfortunately borrows from iOS look and feel.
- The Action Bar pattern is largely ignored.
Action Bar is meant to add navigation, context, and common action support to the title bar space. The new title bar isn't well utilized for these things. Even search, which it used to support no matter where you were in the app, is gone. View filtering for mentions vs. interactions is at the bottom of the app, not in the action bar. And all the potential of the Action Bar is wasted in the tablet app.
- iOS Tab Theming is Prominent
The visual look of the tab bar is very iOS. Blue selection color, grey for unselected, highlights. This is the main interaction surface across the app so its a little jarring to see this iOS look featured prominently in an Android app.
- No Tablet-Format Optimization
The added space and interaction options a tablet affords are not utilized, and like the Classic Twitter version, New Twitter on the tablet is the same exact app as the phone format. Unfortunate because the space is not used to better present information and support information relationships. And its just visually ugly, with lots of small text alongside expanses of empty space.
Quick Action is a pattern for sliding in a tray of options for a selected list item. The previous iOS and Android versions supported this with great effect - favoriting or retweeting a tweet (common actions) could be quickly accomplished by sliding or long-pressing (depending on platform) to enable the quick action bar and make the selection.
Quick Action supports fast, single-finger actions without changing the overall visual context. It's one of the useful affordances that distinguised the native app experience.
On both the tablet and phone versions - search is initiated by clicking into a search text box. But rather than completing text entry in the text box, the UI transforms to bring the standard search overlay in from the top. The search text box is in a sense one long button. Is this the emerging trend for search? Its a little jarring and a waste of screen real-estate.
Seriously who insets list views? People who like ugly UIs I guess. The screen is small - use it.
Why Twitter Why?
This is a pretty bold move to eschew native affordances and enforce extreme consistency. Twitter offers a 'learn it once' reason
The new tab menu is the same across all devices. So you get the same experience on mobile and desktop—anywhere, anytime.
This is an interesting argument, does it invalidate the consistency principle stated above? After all, people likely won't use both Android and iOS interchangably, but they do use the web and a mobile platform. Er, do they?
While I'm not the target audience, I don't. The twitter web UX is so poor compared to third-party tools that I never use it (viva Tweetdeck). But even if I did, I would want it to leverage the screen size and conventions of the platform, not lowest-common-denominator UI.
Did they just not know any better? Hardly - they have the talent and size to achieve custom interfaces for each platform. Are they tired of chasing platform differences? Perhaps. After all - they had implemented the Dashboard (actually I believe Google did that for them) and then switched to an Action Bar before dropping it. While a tedious cat and mouse game, I don't think this is it either.
I believe they are making a concious shift in their brand and monetization strategy, at the same time actively deciding to buck platform differences in favor of a web-centric, not native-centric UI. Give up native app value to best enforce this new model of Twitter. It doesn't matter the platform, you can't escape it.
They are an information channel and they know it. The new Discover paradigm is an attempt to exert influence on your channel experience. Reorganizing all primary UIs at once around this paradigm is an aggressive way to bake this into the brand. How long before this feels like ads or paid programming? Use Discover for a few seconds and I think you'll know the answer.
For now I'll use the non-core client apps - while they exist. But in the future, we may find these shut out, shut down, or perhaps in the case of Tweetdeck (now owned by Twitter) offered at a premium.
New Coke?
But the most significant result of 'new Coke' -- by far," Mr. Goizueta said, [Coca-Cola executive] "was that it sent an incredibly powerful signal ... a signal that we really were ready to do whatever was necessary to build value for the owners of our business.
-- reference
I think Twitter is signalling the same message. We'll give up app excellence to promote a new model. Can a groundswell of opinion reverse course? Not this time. This is more like the New New Coke - a second change to the formula with the lessons learned from the last time.
Will platform differentiation return? I don't think so. At least not until their new Discover model and brand sinks in. Even then, I'm guessing with their core apps they will take a bold stance to eschew platform nuances and native affordances.
