Critiquing by Twitter Design

What we’ve been up to

We post samples of recent work on our Dribbble account. We’ve started posting photos of the studio and the team on 500px. (Some are embedded here in this post.) And, of course, we tweet too, from our team account, and all our personal accounts. Want to know more? Ask me or anyone on the team anytime. Here’s a tip: the service on which we all work makes us all easily contactable. We’re a pretty open bunch, and we’ll answer any questions as openly and honestly as we can.

A perspective on Twitter and @design

Next March, it will be four years that I’ve been working with Twitter, leading and directing the Design team. People ask me all the time if I still like it. My honest answer: I love it now more than I did when I started. Anyone I work with can confirm that.

It’s not that I don’t have fond memories of my early days at Twitter. I do — those first couple years were really good. The people I worked with then, the experiences we had together, and the challenges we faced on a regular basis as a small company were inspiring. But we have a sizable team now, and exponentially more people using the product every single day.

Design has multiple researchers who help us understand how people think about and use the product. We have prototypers and devs who help us rapidly build out and gut-check experiences. And we have a great blend of experience designers who think through and work on problems from concept through to production. We can finally get ahead of big design problems and attack them more strategically.

User Research Explained by Twitter Design

Now, more than ever, our team is really humming, and it’s finding a great groove. We’re fortunate that the team is filled with smart, funny, talented folks who care passionately about Twitter and the product experience. There’s a great, positive energy in the design studio, and it’s contagious.

We recently added Mike Davidson as our VP of Design. I’ve known and respected Mike for ten years, but I’ve never had the chance to work with him directly until now. I’m really happy he’s here to help fight for and defend great design throughout the company, and create the space for Design to push and innovate on Twitter’s experience.

Add to this the impact that Twitter has had and is having all over the world. Connecting people, some who have never met. A pulse of the news, events, and human perspective as it’s unfolding. Distributing awareness of what’s happening in the next room, the next neighborhood over, or around the other side of the world. This free exchange of information is changing the world, and I don’t state that lightly. I’m humbled that I get the opportunity to contribute to the Twitter experience on a daily basis.

We’re just getting started

Built up over the past few years, we’ve seen an incredible evolution of Twitter. It’s a service that many of us value on a daily basis. But our team’s work is not even close to being done. In many ways, we’re just getting started. While Twitter gets tons of exposure and coverage, there’s so much work to do to make it simpler, easier to understand and use right away, and a more beautiful and consistently delightful experience.

Video… That Way! by Twitter Design

Mobile First by Twitter Design

Be one of the team members in these shots. Come help us with some of the most interesting challenges a designer can face today. And contribute to a world-changing service whose impact has only just begun. Join the flock.

The redesign of Wired News in 2002 marked the first time a large, well-known, daily-content publisher had dropped tables for layout, and embraced the separation of markup and style in a rather new (at the time) approach to web design. Several prominent blogs, and niche content sites (zeldman.com, meyerweb.com, alistapart.com) had broken ground, and were already using and evangelizing a greater adoption of Web Standards.

Halfway through the redesign process, I started plotting how Wired could support the standards movement not just by publishing stories about it, but by adopting it outright. If pure, valid XHTML to mark up the content and simple CSS for layout and style was enough for other sites, it should work for Wired too. I contacted Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer to let them know what we were up to. Their excitement over the prospect of Wired jumping on board hinted that this might be a big deal. We dove in head first, and never looked back. Not long after Wired took that leap, many other large, well-known sites and companies began following suit.

I note the tenth anniversary of this redesign, not because of what it was then, but because of how far we’ve come since then, and everything that has been set in motion since. Ten years is a good chunk of time to take note of progress, large and small. Some folks say common tools like HTML and CSS haven’t evolved much. But that misses the point of everything we’ve been able to do and experience because of our use and adoption of them.

Governments, news organizations, retailers, and individuals all around the world use our inter-connectedness in dramatically different ways, compared with ten years ago. Shopping, storing, organizing, and interacting online is now second nature to a massive global population. And increasingly, we’re doing all of this with small devices that fit in a single hand or a pocket.

As I look back on the past ten years, I can easily see how the path of my career, interests, friends, and professional connections were partially shaped by a little redesign in 2002 (now insignificant by today’s standards). A cascade of events and opportunities followed that point in history for me. It was just a matter of spotting them, and jumping on a few.

Where were you ten years ago? What were you doing, and what was your craft like then? Who do you know now that you didn’t know then? What brought you to where you are today? It’s fascinating to think of the journey from the events of ten years ago, all the way up to today. Just think of the next ten years…

Starting today you’ll begin to notice a simplified Twitter bird. From now on, this bird will be the universally recognizable symbol of Twitter.

Whether soaring high above the earth to take in a broad view, or flocking with other birds to achieve a common purpose, a bird in flight is the ultimate representation of freedom, hope and limitless possibility.

The Long and Short of It – super simple tweet embedding in WordPress wp.me/pf2B5-2pL

— Doug Bowman (@stop) December 8, 2011

“And, although I’m confident that I will always think my daughter is The Greatest Thing in the Universe, I’m also all too aware that this feeling will not always be reciprocated in quite that same way or with quite that same enthusiasm that we both enjoy right now.

She won’t always run to my bed in footie jammies.

I’ll only get that particularly noisy and personalized wake-up call for a little while. And, I only get a shot at it once a day. At almost exactly 6:00 AM Pacific Time.

Then one day? I won’t get it any more. It will be gone.”

Simple is not easy.

— Doug Bowman (@stop) March 30, 2011

Here is Instagram’s founder and CEO, Kevin Systrom, validating this deliver-value-quickly notion as a key to Instagram’s success:

“Products can introduce more complexity over time, but as far as launching and introducing a new product in to the market, it’s a marketing problem,” Systrom tells Fast Company. “You have to explain everything you do, and people have to understand it, within seconds.”

“In the mobile context, you need to explain what you do in 30 seconds or less because people move on to the next shiny object. There are so many apps and people are vying for your attention on the go. It’s the one context in which you’ve got lots and lots of other stuff going on. You’re not sitting in front of a computer; you’re at a bus stop or in a meeting.”

In December, he [Ari Ne'eman] was nominated by President Obama to the National Council on Disability (NCD), a panel that advises the President and Congress on ways of reforming health care, schools, support services and employment policy to make society more equitable for people with all forms of disability.

And Ari’s open call to those of us who work in technology:

If we put one-tenth of the money currently spent on looking for causes and cures into developing technologies that enable autistic people with speech challenges to communicate more easily — so-called augmentative and alternative communication [AAC] — we’d have a vast improvement in the quality of life for autistic people and their family members.

It is so easy to love a certain effect and want to use that everywhere. Not all projects need to have the selections sitting on a perfectly lit wooden bookshelf. On one hand we want to be creative and make something that is appealing and can sell the product. On the other side we have to question the cost of that approach on the experience itself and balance style and function with purpose.

ATMs were first introduced over 40 years ago and since then many features have been incrementally added to the machines, in order to fulfill the dream of a truly “automated teller”. Modern ATMs offer a wide range of banking transactions; nevertheless the actual interaction has remained largely untouched.

So far, this app seems incredibly useful for several purposes. I’m using it to quickly record the measurements of rooms in our house. It’s also handy to note the dimensions of some bookshelves in our daughter’s room, so we’ll know what can fit inside. I can easily imagine several other uses too. Here’s a direct link to My Measures in the iTunes Store.

But to the geeky or trained, the desktop is a fount of power and speed. Documents are side by side, text flies from here to there, IMs are answered and dismissed, mockups reloaded, batches processed, all with tiny movements of the fingers. For those of us who work all day on computers, touch interfaces are not an impending disruption.

Steve Jobs’ vision for Apple, repeated in yesterday’s keynote address, posits that the company operates at the intersection between technology and the liberal arts. I think it’s reasonable to regard fine typography as falling within that mandate, but unfortunately, they are falling short of that promise. Building a great display for typography without building great typographic tools is a dereliction of duty.

As any experienced meditator knows, the mind has a mind of its own. Left free to wander, that’s just what it will do. When we manage the infinite demands on our attention by trying to juggle them all, we literally weaken our capacity for absorbed focus.

I’m seeing lots of other folks building out their own archive. And lots of them are using the WordPress solution I wrote about. So in the interest of providing a rough starting point, I’m making the WP theme files for my tweet archive available here (under a CC license) for anyone who wants them as a base. Download tweets.zip (39 KB).

One followup note… Andy Graulund (@graulund) is building a similar tweet archive that is much more robust and more awesome than my original. His is a PHP-based solution (no WordPress required) with embedded media, permalinks back to Twitter, graphs showing tweet activity, and more. I believe he’s planning on releasing his source soon. Keep an eye out for that.

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WordPress-based browsable, searchable archive of tweets by Douglas Bowman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.