San Francisco/New Delhi, Call it a sureshot Snapchat redesign fiasco in the making. The new Twitter look on desktop left users baffled on Tuesday who yelled at the micro-blogging platform for unnecessary trying to bring mobile experience to a desktop.
The new look, gradually being rolled out globally which has reached India, has even removed the profile with photo option on top left — a must for any social media platform to let users know whom they are chatting with — and buried that under a slug called “Profile”.
The tweaks with the design saw users freaking out on Twitter with memes, GIFs and angry posts.
“Do not fix what’s not broken,” a user wrote.
“This is such a bad design that no one wants. I really don’t know what the design team was thinking, because this update is not suitable for desktop usage at all. You’ve designed it to function like a mobile app with obnoxiously big buttons + sections, but this ain’t a mobile,” another user posted.
The updated Twitter website brings more of What’s Happening along with access to other features like Bookmarks, Lists and Profile.
The new version comes with an expanded Direct Messages section and the ability to let users switch between accounts faster and directly from the side navigation. It comes with new dark themes — Dim and Lights Out.
As part of the redesign, while the Home, Explore, Notification and Messages options have been shifted to the left of the desktop, the trending section has been moved to the right of the screen.
“#NewTwitter in a word, hideous. Please listen to those of us who actually USE @twitter rather than your ivory tower engineers. Just because you can design it does not mean you should. Among ugliest interfaces ever. Don’t need live counters. Profile page is now artless. #Clueless,” tweeted another user.
“It is garbage. I have a feeling you’re intentionally trying to kill your platform for all but corporate ad-shills,” wrote another.
“Revert it. You f***** it up again. At times when I want to full screen a video, I get put back to the top of my timeline. Really annoying. After 4 years you still couldn’t fix video buffering and quality either. Work on that instead of new UI that is just worse in usability,” yelled a Twitter user @CalemAnnk.
@bazyjonesy wrote: “I tried this new UI a while back. I could not find a single part of the experience that it improved. They must have a shower of donkeys working at twitter who don’t have a clue what people want”.
“It’s terrible. The tweets – you know, the entire reason people use your site — take up less than one third of the screen. Even the always-visible menu (why?) takes up more space! How did this pass usability testing? A desktop/laptop monitor is not a mobile phone,” said @Paul_LFC.
If CEO Jack Dorsey has approved this redesign, he must take a cue from Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel who approved a major redesign in February 2018 that plunged the company’s growth.
Snapchat’s redesign was a disaster. It led Snapchat’s user count to actually shrink in March.
The company was forced to bring back the popular feature called “reverse chronological order” into its app that allowed users to see recent stories first.
