A little spring cleaning

Wednesday, 9 April 2008

Last night, we rolled out a few minor tweaks to the web UI which should hopefully make your experience with that part of Twitter a little better. Here’s a list of the things that we changed, and why we changed them.

1. Search is now at the top of the page
A little spring cleaning

People would often miss the search box when it was tucked away at the bottom of the sidebar before, so we’ve moved it up to the top of the page to make it easier to find. And consequently, easier for you to find people you might want to follow.

2. ‘Find & Follow’ has been changed

A little spring cleaning

We’ve changed the layout of the Find & Follow page a little to separate out the two different tasks you can perform here (basically: getting us to invite people vs. sending invites via us). This change will also allow us to easily add even more ways for you to discover other people you know who might be using Twitter, which we hope to do soon.

We’ve also revised the wording we use to make it more obvious what will happen at each stage of the process, so you know better what will be sent to who.

3. New profile page display

A little spring cleaning

There’s also a new version of the page that people will see when they view your profile page when they’re not signed in. Since this page is often indexed by Google, we wanted to make sure that new users could quickly see what Twitter was and what it could do, and provide a nice big button for them to join with.

4. Other “fit and finish” details

Finally, there are a few things that we’ve tidied up around the site - we’ve added tabs to the settings page to be more consistent, we’ve moved the sleep setting for your phone over to the devices page rather than having it on a separate page, we’ve added an email invites box to the bottom of the search results in case you don’t find who you’re looking for, we’ve made the link to the page where we offer badges more prominent (look out for new ones soon!), and we’ve added a link to a survey so that we can find out a little bit more about you (this will only be temporary, so if you want to participate, make sure you do now).

This is the first step in our current effort to clean up a few areas of the site that we know need some work. We have a few more fixes to make in the near future (also for SMS and m.twitter.com) before we get on to the exciting new features we have planned for the rest of the year!

We hope the changes make a difference to you and, as ever, we’d love to hear your feedback.