The Inside Story of Twitter's New Redesign

“We used to launch a feature and then search for it and put up a projector of the tweets coming in,” says Biz Stone, Twitter’s cofounder, who rejoined the company two years ago. No, Twitter is for news,” says Kruzeniski.What the design team says now is that Twitter is for conversation. The best stories out of Twitter—the ones about the winds of the Arab Spring, or NBA fanatics buzzing about Kevin Durant, or choose-your-own-adventure-style storylines in which you are cast as Beyoncé's assistant—have to do with people finding likeminded users and responding to each other in real time."Internally, we call this project 'Delight.' One of the things we’re trying to do is make sure this is a delightful experience for users."Jesar Shah, product lead on Twitter.com's redesignThe user interface is the membrane between Twitter’s engineers and its users; the people who build the platform and the people who use it. So Twitter's design team has tried to make choices that nudge people toward the stuff that makes Twitter great: the formations of niche communities, the ability to talk to world leaders and celebrities, the ease of finding pockets of folks with shared interests.“Our purpose is to serve the public conversation,” says Stone. On the right, the search bar features more prominently above a list of trending topics.“People use Twitter a lot on desktop to look for information, and it tends to be around their interests,” says Jesar Shah, the web redesign's product lead. “So we’re trying to make that easier for people, and leverage these new spaces we’ve created on the site and compliment their primary browsing experience.” It’s surfacing the search and explore tabs in a more obvious way in an effort to signpost what Twitter is for: finding your internet tribe.There’s a new profile button in the left sidebar, and it’s easy to switch between accounts. “Personalization and customization—that’s something we hope to start bringing out throughout the product,” says Ashlie Ford, the product designer who led Twitter.com's redesign.Twitter has considered bolder ideas—like removing the metrics from tweets, for example—and earlier this year it introduced twttr, a prototyping app for these and other experiments. Given that we’re a global company, it’s our responsibility to make sure we’re understanding everyone’s needs.”To that end, Shah, Ford, and the team created a survey for Twitter users to give feedback on the design. But Twitter thinks that it can at least help define what Twitter is for and begin grappling with some of those questions about its identity.“In the past, as a company, we’ve struggled, because if you ask people at Twitter what they use Twitter for, you’d get a thousand different answers,” says Kruzeniski.