Thoughts on the New Twitter Homepage

Twitter, Homepage

It’s no surprise that Twitter’s extreme growth mixed with its difficulties with user retention has brought about the need for a few changes. Recent changes include exposing twitter trends and search, quicker navigation to past tweets, and a new follower screen. Much of these changes come from the direct influence of Google’s ex Visual Design Lead, Doug Bowman (@stop), who joined the Twitter team in late March of 2009. Bowman & Co.’s latest project went live an hour ago with a freshly launched new Twitter homepage.

For those of us familiar with Twitter, and all the applications to access it, we rarely see Twitter’s homepage but for 99% of the people who aren’t tweeting yet it’s a very important entry point. It is responsible for the first impression and what may ultimately determine whether a user signs up or scurries along back to Facebook.

More Sophisticated
The new homepage shows a more sophisticated Twitter and strays away from the “playful” design of the past. The bird is smaller, the colors toned down a little bit, and the lines much cleaner. I’m a fan.

Explaining Twitter
One of the funny things about Twitter is that for the most part, save for hashtags and the various shortcuts for replies and messages, the service is extremely easy to explain. You have 140 characters including spaces to share your location, thoughts, a link, or reply to someone else’s location, thoughts, and links.

However, anyone who has a friend who loves Facebook and just doesn’t see the point in Twitter will know that it’s more difficult to explain the benefits of Twitter than how it actually works. This problem is directly related to the visitor loyalty rate being low relative to other platforms. The new design attacks this significant problem with the tag line, “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world”. Why they left out a period at the end of this sentence is a little strange but the message is clear, Twitter is how you find out what’s going on.

Criticisms? Not yet, no.
I was going to criticize some of the UX elements of the page but I’ve actually noticed that since launching less than an hour ago they already have made some significant changes.

Twitter New Homepage

If you look at the first image in my post you’ll notice that there are two places to sign up or join now, signified by the green button. On first glance I thought this was a bit redundant even if not too confusing… my second screenshot shows that they removed that feature pretty quickly.

If you clicked on the “Sign In” button an hour ago it took you to the old login page but that too has now been updated with a drop-down form with fields to login directly.

Also, although taglines are a nice effort to explain the benefit of Twitter showing tangible benefits is a much more powerful way to say, “Hey sign-up already!” In my second screenshot you’ll see that the top trends by hour, day, week were omitted from the first relaunch (again less than an hour ago).

So I’ll keep any other criticism to myself right now and give the folks over at Twitter like @stop time to do what they do best… keep it simple.

What are your thoughts? Do you prefer the old landing page compared to the new one? Do you even see the homepage on a daily basis?