Why people aren’t spending as much time on Twitter as other medias
A UX/UI breakdown of one of the biggest micro-blogging social media platforms
“From breaking news and entertainment to sports and politics, from big events to everyday interests. If it’s happening anywhere, it’s happening on Twitter.” — Twitter
So, if Twitter’s brand is encompassing and inclusive why do people feel censored? What is it that people find so confusing in the beginning stages that they download Twitter, click out of it then start actively using it years later? Why isn’t it bringing in the same numbers as Instagram’s or Facebook’s billions?
A UX/UI designer's goal is understanding the demographics that your users belong to, what their goals are, and how the platform benefits them. Then using that research and knowledge to answer those questions and create even better experiences for your primary user that will eventually lead to more users.
Therefore, the main questions I wanted the answer to going into this project was: What do people go on Twitter for? How do we make their lives easier? And is there anything people want from Twitter that they aren’t getting?
So, I started my qualitative research by asking some active users exactly that: what do you use the platform for?
WELL, I USE TWITTER TO…
“promote products, get news and mostly use it in a work environment”
Are there any other apps you use besides Twitter?
You might side-eye this question because why would you want to know what other apps your user is using? Well, because you want to better understand what your user is familiar with and their expectations.
WELL, I USE…
“apps such as Instagram, Reddit, and Spotify”
Then we can create boards comparing Twitter to the other platforms that our user uses to better understand their frustrations, our weak points, and the potential blue ocean, through Competitive Feature Comparison and Market Positioning Charts. With the Market Positioning Chart having functional/innovative on the X-axis to plot the differences between how the users’ use the app: whether they come for functionality or innovation in the features and popular/amateur being how their MAU (Monthly Active Users), to try to see if there is a trend between how innovative an app is and whether they tend to do better than other apps that are just there to perform their function.
Using a synthesis of the overall data and research collected we can plot them all on an Affinity Map and the user portion of the Proposition Canvas.
Where we can better visualize what categories our answers fall into and clearly decipher them into what our customer jobs are, what their pains are, and what their gains are.
For an even better cushion before solution brainstorming, you can pull some more secondary research by going straight to the existing app’s (Twitter’s) reviews and highlighting the main issues that are repeated and causing the most distress.
Is there anything you wish Twitter could do better?
I WISH IT HAD…
“either scheduled tweets or business accounts to run more thorough twitter analytics”
“better bookmarking options”
“a way to block certain news from showing on your timeline”
Then with the main problems that our users have, we can create problem statements such as, A 38-year-old who feels anxious about daily news needs to change their trending page and turn it into a How Might We question:
How might we change users' feelings on navigating through daily news?
And answer it by creating Brainstorming boards and introducing the Moscow Method, a feature prioritization method that groups our solutions into must-haves, should-haves, could-haves, and won't-haves. Go the extra mile by having the impact and effort on the axis to show the effort it will take to implement those solutions and the impact it will have on your user.
With all of our research, problem statements, and solutions we can create a User Journey Map that can illustrate our User’s frustrations as they go through the whole app experience: Opening, Browsing, Reading, then leaving. Through secondary research, we know that the average user uses Twitter for 3 minutes so our goal is to make users stay for longer.
Therefore we get our Jobs To Be Done framework being:
When in a rush, users want to quickly get access to old bookmarks, so that they can share with others, but cannot, which makes them feel disheartened.
Users want to read trending news so that they can quickly be informed, but can’t, which makes them feel dejected and drained.
When promoting, users want to have business accounts, so that they can be easily identified, however, they cannot, making them feel insecure.
Now we have a bunch of our solutions categorized and know the jobs we have to relieve with that we can pick the Minimum Viable Products, the minimum solutions we can have to relieve our user’s frustrations through features.
The Main Features being: Trigger Warnings, Folder Bookmarks, and Business Accounts. Where we can have: tags that alert users on material that may maintain graphic, violent, or adult images, an organized and customized folder for all of the user’s saved bookmarks, that allow them to quickly find what they’re looking for, accounts to promote more fluidity for businesses’ recognition and security. With our main focus being Folder Bookmarks because of the sheer reviews and frustrations with not being able to locate saved tweets easily and quickly.
Consequently, we can create User Flow Charts that show our user’s going through the feature and performing the tasks. Where the user finds the photo they want to bookmark and save it under the folder they desire. Then we can create our Low Fidelity prototypes that match our app’s layout and our User Flow Chart.
“85% of the usability problems are solved with 5 user tests”
Through many user testing and heat maps, we found out that this user flow wasn’t the best because of the high misclicks and time it took to complete.
“it’s a bit confusing, might be because I don’t use Twitter as much anymore”
So we carried the change onto the Mid Fidelity and new User Flow Chart.
Being the user lands on the home page, clicks on their profile, find the bookmark tab, go through their customized folders, and retreat the tweet they were looking for under that specific category.
Evidently, we saw a decrease in the time on task but around the same amount of misclicks with the new user flow. Through our High Fidelity, we stayed with the same flow and incorporated Twitter’s Atomic Design, the app’s: logo, color schemes, buttons, and typography.
Where the third screen is the newly implemented feature where the user can customize the location of their tweets to easily retrieve the tweet they were looking for quickly.
Slide 30 — Illustrates how the feature would work, how it would function like with a video embedded, and even a link where you can test it out yourself. Through our Failure and Success Metrics, we can find our faults and where we hit the nail on the head. Ultimately our goal is to get more reviews and interviews, test the High Fidelity Prototype, talk with stakeholders, and get other features developed.
Thank you for reading. If you found this interesting feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
Gaelle Charlet — TheFemmeCoder, is 3 weeks into Ironhack’s UX/UI’s program.
