Why Twitter's biggest redesign in years is annoying users
Twitter has had a design change. Yes. Of all the things the micro blogging website needed, including better anti-bullying/anti-abuse rules, and fewer Nazis, Twitter decided to focus on repackaging itself and that too badly.
The company said on June 15, it will be "refreshing" the platform in the days to follow, in an attempt to make it "lighter, faster, and easier to use" for current users. Changes in the website’s user interface include a new side navigation menu, a new typeface and weird new icons.
It is undoubtedly Twitter’s biggest redesign in years.
Solid gray icons are now a lighter outline drawing. Headers appear in bold. Round avatars, something in the lines of Instagram, look unnecessary. The “Retweet” and “Like” icons are a little different and their counters now update in real time (which is a good thing) and the reply button has transformed into speech bubble which is again, an improvement. The home icon is still a birdhouse, but it lost the perch. Twitter's iconic bird motif too, has almost disappeared.
According to Grace Kim, Twitter's head of user research and design, many of the changes are based upon user feedback. "We listened closely and kept what you love," Kim wrote in a blog post. "And for the things you didn't, we took a new approach to fix and make better."
“I think the design team felt like it was the right moment, because Twitter finally had a clear of what we're doing”, she added.
But it would seem that a large chunk of Twitter users are not-at-all happy with how things have changed. As it is, the netizens are not the most accepting of changes, and when the changes are those they don’t want, a new outrage is born.
old twitter vs new twitter pic.twitter.com/Ct4JC3UM5o
— Ellie Sunakawa (@elliesunakawa) June 15, 2017
ur new twiter avatar pic.twitter.com/s7pWsZynHx
— Seinfeld Current Day (@Seinfeld2000) June 15, 2017
TWITTER: what do users want?USERS: fewer nazis, mostlyTWITTER: what if we did a graphical redesign instead pic.twitter.com/RuKngLAqJK
— Kelsey D. Atherton (@AthertonKD) June 15, 2017
Honestly I like the new Twitter buttons pic.twitter.com/eHEaGthcmU
— Jason O. Gilbert (@gilbertjasono) June 15, 2017
Users : We want an edit buttonTwitter: wE wAnT aN EdIt bUtToN #NewTwitter pic.twitter.com/NcK9UehGnH
— Sasuke Uchiha (@SasukeEmpire) June 15, 2017
twitter's corny redesign looks like they made a twitter for kids pic.twitter.com/sHfCL42S7n
— Tim Marcin (@TimMarcin) June 15, 2017
Talk about squaring the cicel, or, in this case, circling the square.
Old Twitter vs New Twitter pic.twitter.com/xTXMdabYuY
— shilo (@PartyWithShilo) June 15, 2017
twitter, yesterday vs twitter, today pic.twitter.com/tsticQ6ROb
— Lana Del Raytheon (@LanaDelRaytheon) June 15, 2017
Twitter, over the years has received a lot of criticism for its policies. An onslaught of fake news, abuse, racism and troll behaviour, something that the website seems to have no control over, has lost it its credibility. In a rather disheartening opinion piece my Matthew Clayfield in The Guardian, the journalist explains just how Twitter lost its value as a news source. He accurately points out what Twitter has now become: a cable news channel, with hundreds and thousands of pundits “talking at cross-purposes, breaking little but wind”.
And while the website has made attempts to curb certain racist, supremacist voices like Tila Tequila and Milo Yiannopoulos, for the most part, abuse on Twitter goes unchecked and unmordertated, something public forums like Reddit have gone out of their way to tackle.
In a rather detailed piece about Twitter’s abuse policy, senior tech journalist Charlie Warzel elaborates on why the case is so. It has a lot to do with the company’s ideology:
And while Blogger’s free speech problems were novel, small-scale, and often abstract, Twitter’s follower model and public reply system proved thornier to manage. There’s a big difference between people saying hurtful things on the easily moderated comment section of a hard-to-find blog and people showing up in your mentions spewing hate speech. “The product quirks were secondary ... to free speech,” one former employee said of the company’s early days. “The Blogger brain trust’s thinking was set in stone by the time they became Twitter Inc.”
Maybe one day Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, will understand that just removing the iconic bird motif or the quill motif will do little to change the bigger problem that is the ethos of the company and the philosophy of those who make the decisions. Dorsey might claim that the design change is the result of his mantra of counting on user feedback, but if that were so, why would abuse still exist on this website and continue to grow at an alarming pace?