Twitter’s Smart Redesign

September 19, 2008

Yes­ter­day, Twit­ter rolled out some design changes to its inter­face. It wasn’t any­thing major, but it was great work and here’s why: First, the inter­face evolved more than it changed. Users weren’t hit with a dras­tic new layout or crazy color scheme—just subtle mod­i­fi­ca­tions and polish to the page. The tabs were moved to the right side­bar, stat infor­ma­tion was reor­ga­nized and but­tons and icons cleaned up. Second, new fea­tures were added qui­etly so they didn’t distract from the orig­i­nal user expe­ri­ence. The new design cus­tomizer remained in it’s orig­i­nal loca­tion but with some added func­tion­al­ity in the form of a color picker and custom wall­pa­per selec­tion tool. Users were left to dis­cover this on their own, with­out the need of new links, but­tons or banners.

Twit­ter has suc­cess­fully man­aged to bring a fresh look and feel to their inter­face with­out making every­one relearn a new layout and design. Twit­ter was built on sim­plic­ity and this new design proves they are com­mit­ted to main­tain­ing that reputation.

Tags: twitter, web design