How Would I Improve Twitter’s UI

Twitter is quickly gathering pace and is fast becoming one of the most popular social networks. I have been using Twitter for nearly 2 years, mostly through their use of 3rd part applications like TweetDeck or Tweetie. I thought to myself why do I, and many other ‘power’ Twitter users not use the web interface? So here are some of my suggestions on how I would improve the Twitter UI.

Twitter home page design at the time of writing the article, including some reference points.

I will be focusing on a number of parts of the home page, the main ‘tweet box’, the implementation of the ‘lists’ area, how the data is presented and the integration with search. This is not meant as a critique of Twitter, but more as some helpful suggestions on usability.

Tweet Box

For lack of a better word, the tweebox is the textarea located at the top of the twitter homepage. I would really love to see it improved in a number of really simple ways:

• The ability to press enter to submit a tweet. Tweets aren’t multi lined and there is nothing else to do so why not make enter submit the form instead of press the button. Twitter has this problem in a number of other area’s as well, OAuth screen!
• Autocomplete the usernames in the textbox.
• Auto shortening. Twitter has already partly done this for really long links, but it would be nice if you could have the option to do it on the shorter links as well.

Page improvements

The live update of tweets, you know the little yellow box which tells you how many are waiting, is a fantastic addition. But I think they are missing the key points, why wouldn’t you show the tweet? I just find it really annoying.

The page is currently geared up to just tweeting. Users probably use the Twitter interface more to manage their tweets and accounts, maybe the front page should be geared in that direction.

Other

The lists nor retweets seem to be fully integrated into the UI they just appear to be something strapped onto the edge. It would be great if you could, for example, have tabs across your timeline which listed your most popular lists.

It would be great to hear your thoughts on how you would make twitter better, you never know maybe Twitter is reading this.

Better Twitter

Hopefully my recently released Firefox plugin Better Twitter will solve most of these issues.