Design Spotlight: The New Twitter Homepage

Last Tuesday Twitter unveiled their redesign of their homepage. The change is intended to help remedy peoples’ inability to grasp the concept of Twitter, putting trending topics and a search field front-and-center. Instead of promoting to new users the ability to say what they’re doing, they’re pushing the idea that they use Twitter to “share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.”

Defining a “tweet” for the uninitiated and explaining how to create an account doesn’t resonate with everyone. “Why would I want to do that?” is a common reaction. However, demonstrating the power of Twitter as a discovery engine for what is happening right now through our Search and Trends often awakens a sense of wonder which inevitably leads to a much more compelling question, “How do I get involved?”

New Twitter Homepage

I think the new design is pretty good. It’s clean, the color scheme is nice, and the imagery looks a lot more polished than in the previous design.

There are still some rough edges, like with the trending topics. If you try to click one of the links on the immediate right, where they’re half-faded, you have to do some pixel hunting to find the tiny area that will respond correctly to your click.

Other than that, my only major complaint is that the login form is hidden in a dropdown, while the register button is shown so prominently. While this makes sense from a stylistic and business standpoint, it’s a bit of a pain for existing users.