New Twitter

Twitter revamped their user interface yesterday on their iPhone and Android apps, as well as their website. It is a pretty significant change and I am of two minds about it.

Branding

As a designer I really appreciate the updated branding. The icon-centric simplification is pretty great, especially on the website. Twitter is successfully asserting itself and projecting what it finds important in their service. This brings me to what I don’t like about it.

Different Priorities

It is clear that what Twitter thinks is important is not what I like about Twitter. I have never used Twitter to discover things in the way that they clearly want me to. I find out about somebody interesting, follow them on Twitter, and enjoy the info and resources that they post. I don’t really search on Twitter or follow trending topics. What attracted me to the service in the first place was focusing on the things I am interested in and having control over who I listen to.

I do not know whether I am representative of Twitter’s user-base as a whole, but I will be sticking with 3rd party apps (Tweetbot is my go-to client), as long they are allowed to exist.