Twitter is currently testing a new feature called “Who to follow” (henceforth referred by its unfortunate acronym, WTF). When I log in there’s a box on the main page that suggests two users for me to follow. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s exactly what Facebook does.
The purpose of a test like this is to gather feedback, so here’s some feedback. (The usual caveats apply: I don’t work at Twitter, I don’t know the specifics of their technology or the requirements for this project, and I may be grumpy from the cold I’ve had all week.)
I hate it. It’s poorly named, poorly placed, and poorly implemented.
Poorly Named
“Who to follow” is a command. It’s like saying “Do This Now.” People don’t like suggestions phrased as commands. So why not call it something like: “Suggested Twitterers” or “You Might Like”?
It’s important to understand the emotions you’re triggering in the user. Human brains have evolved to recognize and react to faces. Showing the faces of people you know, along with command language, can create dissonance. It’s as if the person is giving you the command. That’s one of the reasons people are reacting so strongly.
Poorly Placed
The location of information on a page offers insight into the company’s priorities. In this case, WTF appears on the right side of the page, above the main Twitter navigation (@replies, Direct Messages, Favorites, Retweets, and Search). This location implies that WTF is more important than the rest of those things. I disagree. It should be below the main navigation, with the rest of the optional items (Saved Searches, Lists, Trending, and Following).
Speaking of those optional items, all of them can be toggled into a closed/minimized state that shows only the title of the section and not the content. But WTF does not get this toggle. Why? Adding the toggle would provide a pressure-release valve for members like me who don’t like it, while still making it available for those who do. Twitter’s designers clearly know this – a toggle is available for every other sidebar item outside of the main navigation – so the fact that it’s not implemented for WTF is perplexing.
The only rationale for its placement, as far as I can tell, is that the top right corner is where it’s implemented on Facebook. But that’s not a good reason.
Poorly Implemented
WTF routinely recommends people I’ve blocked, and as you know, I block liberally. It also suggests people I’d followed for a while and consciously decided to stop following (sometimes you can like a person and not like their tweets). So suggesting these people is unhelpful at best, aggravating at worst.
Finally, it’s aimed at the wrong audience. I can see how a feature like this would be very helpful to new members, but I am not a new member. My first public tweet was four years ago (my account was private before that). Twitter knows this about me. A more elegant interface would be active in making suggestions to new users, but more passive with active users like me, who’ve shown they already know how to find and follow people.
All in all, Twitter’s WTF is a great case study on why a feature that works well on Facebook cannot simply be copied and placed into another social context. Facebook is all about fastidious friend list maintenance – that’s the basic element there. Twitter is about … something else. The relationships are part of it, sure, but there’s more afoot. That’s why I like it.
Just to be clear, I’m not arguing against the existence of the feature, I’m just critiquing its implementation. Having a steady stream of new inputs is how community systems avoid groupthink. So the system should encourage users to follow more/different people. It should just be done as an optional suggestion, with more smarts behind it, in a place that’s equivalent to its value to the user. In other words, it should be designed to feel like Twitter. As it stands now, it feels like a piece of Facebook, grafted on to Twitter.
I should also say, I feel for the Twitter design team. They’re tinkering with a speeding train with a billion passengers that’s laying track as it goes. And all the passengers have bullhorns. It’s a tough gig and I want to see them succeed. I hope this post is taken as just a little piece of feedback from a longterm member with a pounding headache.
In February 2004, as Heather and I were planning our wedding, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom decided that he could no longer tolerate the state’s disregard of its own constitution, which states that all citizens are equal under the law. On Valentine’s Day 2004, City Hall began issuing marriage licenses to all couples, regardless of gender.
Word spread fast and Heather and I went down to City Hall to see what was happening. What we saw was indescribable joy. Floodgates of love opening. Cheers from the growing crowd as each couple exited the building, finally legally equal.
We know what happened after that. The weddings were halted, Proposition 8 was put on the ballot (and paid for by mostly out-of-state religious zealots). And in perhaps the biggest moment of cognitive dissonance ever, on the night we elected Obama to be president, Californians amended their constitution with the words, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” A lawsuit ensued.
Plaintiffs do not seek recognition of a new right. To characterize plaintiffs’ objective as “the right to same-sex marriage” would suggest that plaintiffs seek something different from what opposite-sex couples across the state enjoy – namely, marriage. Rather, plaintiffs ask California to recognize their relationships for what they are: marriages.
Proposition 8 places the force of law behind stigmas against gays and lesbians, including: gays and lesbians do not have intimate relationships similar to heterosexual couples; gays and lesbians are not as good as heterosexuals; and gay and lesbian relationships do not deserve the full recognition of society.
Many of the purported interests identified by proponents are nothing more than a fear or unarticulated dislike of same-sex couples. Those interests that are legitimate are unrelated to the classification drawn by Proposition 8. The evidence shows that, by every available metric, opposite-sex couples are not better than their same-sex counterparts; instead, as partners, parents and citizens, opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples are equal.
The evidence did not show any historical purpose for excluding same-sex couples from marriage, as states have never required spouses to have an ability or willingness to procreate in order to marry. Rather, the exclusion exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage. That time has passed.
In much of the news coverage today, I’ve seen the phrase “Pro-Gay Marriage” used to describe the people who are celebrating Judge Walker’s ruling. But this rubs me the wrong way.
I’m not Pro-Gay Marriage, I’m Pro-Equality. I’m not Pro-Gay Rights, I’m Pro-Common Sense. I’m Anti-Discrimination. I’m Anti-Enshrining Your Queasiness About Buttsex In My Constitution. I’m Pro-When The Constitution Says We’re All Equal, It Means We’re All Equal.
I’m married, and it matters. It changes the way I look at the world, and the way the world looks at me. It comes with state and federal benefits and rights. Withholding those things from same-sex couples is discrimination, pure and simple. If you support withholding rights from people because of who they are, you’re a bigot. Period.
My grandmother taught me two important lessons. The first was tolerance. Enjoy people who are different from you. It’s the variety that makes life wonderful. The second was to always look out for the rights of others. Because if you sit by and let discrimination happen, you’ll be next.
My grandmother learned these lessons firsthand as a Jewish woman in Poland in the 1940s. In this country, we’re fortunate to have a mostly equitable, mostly tolerant place to live. But Proposition 8 is the clearest kind of discrimination – no different from the laws that kept my grandmother from going to school, or the anti-miscegenation laws from America’s past.
It is the duty of all people blessed with common sense, people who see in same-sex couples the same love they share with their partners, people who believe in equality and liberty, to stand up for our gay and lesbian friends and neighbors. We are Pro-Love. We are Pro-Equality. We will not tolerate discrimination. We will not shut up.
Because if you don’t stand up for other people’s rights, who will stand for yours?
I’ve been designing for websites for 15 years now, and designing for print for even longer. For the last few months, I led the design of MagCloud’s iPad app (now available in iTunes) with an incredibly talented group of people, and it was unlike any other experience I’ve had as a designer. Here are a few things I learned.
It’s intimate.
The iPad is an intimate experience for a user. The direct touch input removes a layer of abstraction, and that’s a really big deal. In this way, it was like going back to design for print – when you push it with your finger, it moves! – but it’s utterly unlike print in every other way imaginable. Point is, the direct interface really does mean reevaluating every assumption when it comes to interactive design.
All the terms changed.
I never realized how much web terminology had crept into my vocabulary. An iPad app doesn’t have pages, it has screens or views. You don’t click, you tap. You don’t scroll, you swipe. I spent much of our early meetings stumbling over my own words just to communicate the basics.
Goodbye, sweet hover.
I’ve always loved hover states. When a web page changes under your mouse pointer, it shows you that it’s paying attention to you. But remove the mouse and you remove the hover. Apple’s solution in Safari on iPad has been to make one tap show the hover, and another to commit the click. This is utterly confusing for every real user I’ve seen try it. So hover states are on the way out. I’ll miss them.
Hello, awesome gestures.
Gestures go beyond creating an intimate connection. They turn a computing device into an instrument. After all, you don’t use a guitar, you play it. And what’s playing a guitar besides learning a series of gestures?
Don’t believe me? Check out Uzu app. All it does is make pretty pictures, but with very complicated gestures, accommodating up to 10 fingers on the device at once!
Our humble MagCloud app doesn’t do anything this fancy, but I was able to make use of the pinch in/out gesture in a couple cool places in the reading experience (pinch in to see all pages, pinch out to zoom into a page). There’s much more work to be done here.
It takes time.
I drastically underestimated how much time it’d take to do the design phase of the app. Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty quick with the web design, which made me overconfident. Apps have a lot of hidden corners that can disrupt a user experience. Getting them right takes time.
Design language still emerging.
We’ve had 15 years to figure out a visual language for the web, and it’s still evolving. The iPad has a few conventions, but they’ll look as silly in a year or two as the candy-colored iMacs look now. Personally, I love working in areas that still have a lot of undiscovered country, but it can be challenging, too. Sometimes, the only way to solve a new problem is with a new solution. That’s fun.
Apple’s App Store was a constant source of stress in the development process. Every time another story of Apple randomly booting an app from the store came out, the whole team quaked. The idea that we could do all this work and then Apple could deny the app, or even keep it in limbo forever, made us second- or third-guess every design decision. “Will this pixel hurt our chances of getting accepted?”
Apple is killing the creativity of their developers with the uncertainty of their App store policies. We made it through okay, thankfully, but I can only wonder about how much more interesting the store would be if Apple had given developers a clear list of rules, and promised to stick to it. The Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt people have about the App Store was entirely optional – Apple brought it on itself, and it’s not going away.
But all that aside, I have to say it’s thrilling to be doing design for a device that, even just a few years ago, would have been a crazy sci-fi pipe dream. There’s no question in my mind that iPads and the oncoming wave of similar devices are going to be around for a good long time. I can’t wait to see how they evolve.
So I have this nutty idea to make a site for people who like plants but aren't, well, hardcore botanists. As Flickr popularized photography and used photos as the framework of a social network, so could we popularize gardening and be connected to each other through our plants. If this sounds interesting to you, please fill out this form. We're gonna need plant people from experts to beginners, and some hardcore web tech jedi to put it all together. Who wants to try?
