Twitter app auto-vandalism
Twitter today released an update to their iPhone app that they described as an experiment. Hopefully this means it’s a work in progress and we will see the serious flaws in the app rectified in the near future. For what it’s worth here are my thoughts on what I see as the significant problems with the latest version of what was an exemplary iPhone app.
The ability to resize text has been removed. The Twitter app had previously allowed this and it was a very helpful feature, well executed. It’s removal creates an accessibility issue that many less well designed mobile apps suffer from. Especially as the default text size is quite small. There is no excuse for any app to lack this feature.
The feed no longer uses the full width of the screen, for purely decorative reasons. The screens on mobile devices are small enough without throwing valuable space way for no useful purpose.
The groundbreaking side swipe gesture on a tweet to reveal interactions has been removed. This was a fantastic piece of interaction design that has been thrown away. The new version changes views when a tweet is tapped and requires about the same number of taps to complete an operation but it is less elegant an approach and breaks the reading experience.
You can no longer copy text from a tweet without generating a quoted retweet and then copying the text from the edit window. For a service that is centred around posting and reporting text this is a frustrating limitation. In fact, if you wish to copy text from one of your own tweets you have to select Mail Tweet and copy the text from the daft email message. On a mobile device, anything that saves the user from typing is helpful. Doesn’t anyone read the HIG?
Discover, one of the four tab bar options has nothing to do with content to or from followers. Rather, it is a Clumsy attempt to push profit generating content to users. I’m all for Twitter making money, they provide a great service that has global cultural significance. However, the only thing the placement of this section is likely to do is to annoy users by forcing useful features to be crammed into the three remaining sections. On the plus side, it means all the pushed content is corralled and easily ignored.
The search bar at the top of the Home feed is missing, which happened a few minor versions ago. This was a brilliant tool for finding tweets you read a while ago and for generally getting to content quickly. It exists in a version some f the other tabs so the values is known to twitter. It would be great to have it back.
There are many more flaws in the new version of the iPhone twitter app but I’ll stop there for now. Suffice to say that I’m not a fan of the new app and feel it is a step backwards in the usability of the app. Perhaps in that respect the quill in the compose icon is appropriate.
