A Twitter for My Sister

screenshot via Twitter.com


In the early days of Twitter the company’s founders repeatedly said that expanding the service was like building a rocket ship in mid-flight. Twitter grew so quickly that it was almost impossible to add new features because engineers spent their time trying to keep the rocket ship from stalling — which often happened anyway.

Now, more than five years later, Twitter is stable, cruising at an altitude of more than 200 million postings a day.

So why the big redesign that was unveiled on Thursday? The answer comes down to one thing: my sister.

As I wrote earlier this year, Twitter has had a problem trying to become relevant to new users who find it confusing. I came to this realization when I watched my sister try to use Twitter. She, along with dozens of other readers I have spoken with, simply didn’t understand how to use the service and found it incredibly confusing.

Specifically, non-techies find the @ and # symbols don’t make much sense. Twitter has known this, but couldn’t exactly remove them from the service, after all, these symbols have become the fundamentals of Twitter’s entire communications system. Removing these key characters would be like removing numbers from a telephone.

That’s where the new Twitter comes in. The company had to figure out a way to keep the site running for people who are more technologically adept and for those who understand and rely on the @ and # symbols to use the service. But, it also must make sense for those who think these characters are used as substitutes for swear words in comic strips.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder, and Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive, both stressed during Thursday’s press conference showcasing the new Twitter that the updates were about simplicity and discovery. “As other services tack feature after feature after feature on top of each other, we’re going to go in an opposite direction,” Mr. Costolo said. “We’re offering simplicity over complexity.”

As a result the site has been broken down into four key elements: Home, Connect, Discover and Me. You don’t need to think about strange characters, you just click on one of the four sections, and type away, the new Twitter does the rest of the work for you.

To add to the simplicity — or take away from the complexity — Twitter has also updated the design elements of the service across the entire ecosystem. The Tweet Button, for example, is now in the top right of any screen including a computer, iPhone or Android phone.

You can look at the changes on Twitter similarly to the advent of a graphical user interface that made its debut in early-1980s computers. The design was called WIMP and stood for “windows, icons, menus and pointers.” Before WIMP, the only way to use a computer was by writing code, something most people couldn’t even comprehend.

After this major change in computing, programmers could still interact with the computer by writing code, but mere mortal humans could now interact with the computer through a graphical interface that wasn’t as intimidating. Twitter’s new design does the same thing for users who are afraid of the @ and # symbols. They still exist for people who want access to them, people who don’t understand these tools can completely ignore them.

These updates are all about removing friction from the site and creating discoverability on Twitter. Of course, even this will be difficult for many people to understand, but it’s a step towards a simpler Twitter. One that still works for engineers, but makes sense for my sister too.