Twitter has long been criticized for the usability of its web and mobile apps, and version 4 of the official Twitter client for IOS 5 is no different. Instead of improving the user experience, this release makes their service more difficult to use. I’ve long argued that in order for Twitter to create long-term relevance as a company, it needs to provide a simple and useful user experience across all of its interfaces. This means getting away from the geeky user-contributed hacks that sprung up in response to shortcomings in the early versions of Twitter.

In the early days, these little hacks were endearing to the user community. Then Twitter started trying to help its users by integrating some of these functions into their website and mobile applications.

Bad move.

Much of what made Twitter useful in the first place – Hashtags, @user and many other little Twitter specific conventions are hacks that were first adopted by users because Twitter didn’t support several key functions like groups or addressing a note to a specific user. Twitter has made the mistake of trying to integrate these workarounds into the base DNA of their service.

Why is this a mistake? These are hacks, which are by definition “useful but inelegant solutions to a problem“. Not scalable, well-thought-out, simple and commercially sustainable solutions. Useful & inelegant solutions.

Unfortunately recent releases of both the web and mobile clients have strayed away from useful hack and we’re left with something that’s not near enough useful.

Twitter appears to have fallen into the trap of blindly listening to its users and failing to understand what its users are trying to accomplish. Don’t pay attention to what your users ask you for, pay attention to what they are trying to achieve.

I digress. This post isn’t meant to be a dissection of everything that Twitter is messing up in their product architecture – they get a lot of things right and importantly, they have over 500 millions users. All I really want to do is point out a few things that I really, really don’t like about Twitter 4 for IOS 5. I thought it was helpful to provide some context about things I think they are messing up more generally to make it more obvious why I think what I think about what they are messing up with their IOS version.

I believe that much of the confusion swirls around their efforts to simplify features that were poorly conceived to begin with. Moving stuff around on these various screens and giving them different names isn’t going to solve any real problems for Twitter or its users.

First off, if simplifying mobile Twitter was a goal for Twitter 4, then some effort should have gone into making it readily obvious what the @, #, include a picture and geotagging icons in the composition window mean.

Each of these icons sit at the bottom of the composition window and there isn’t much of an invitation to use them. Even when they are tapped, the function is completely opaque as to what the user should do next. Power users take these meanings for granted and most regular users attribute other meanings to these icons. The @ symbol is most obviously related to an email function, the # symbol could refer to a calculator or a telephone function. Include a pic is probably the best of the four – not much to confuse a user there but right beside it is the geotag icon. It carries no obvious meaning, and even for the most ardent power-users, is so vastly under-utilized that Twitter could probably consider dropping this function entirely.

Twitter 4 uses four top-level navigation cues to help users find their way around the software – Home, Connect, Discover and Me.

Others have gone deep on why that might not be the best method, definitely worth a read. My complaint lies within the Connect tab – I don’t get it.

As a long-time user, I’ve been able to muddle through the functions on this screen and map them back to old functions, but for a beginning user, the similarities between Connect, Interactions and Mentions is going to be nothing but confusing. These labels will need some substantial rethinking before they are immediately obvious to a user.

And to make it more confusing, Twitter includes a search function in the Connect tab that doesn’t tell the user its a search function. The form field asks you to enter an “@name” (what’s that?) or a full name. For what purpose? A small UI cue would go a long way here.

Further, the Connect tab doesn’t make it obvious at all that most of the tweets and things that are displayed under this tab are interactions that people are having with me, or how they have interacted with my tweets. Sure retweeting is an obvious function for experienced users, but to the neophyte, telling someone that they’ve been retweeted five times is meaningless.

Tapping the Discover tab unveils an even more confusing mess of functionality.

It shows Stories and Trends and gives the user no idea what these relate to. Can I write a story, is this just for reading? Where are my friends? Are these my trends? Usage stats? What? Ugh. A confusing mess.

Find Friends and Browse Categories is a lot more obvious, but these are buried down at the bottom of the screen – probably because Twitter doesn’t have much a revenue model around these functions yet. But why is Find Friends and Browse Categories under Discover? Why aren’t they under Connect? Wouldn’t it make more sense to help me connect to people by Finding Friends?

Most of my Twitter use is split between a few accounts. Prior versions of Twitter for IOS made it obvious and easy to switch between accounts. Twitter 4 does not. Guess where its been hidden? As a sub label under “Me”.

Worse still, click on “Settings” under “Me” (why are settings and multi-user switching buried here at all?) and you’ll see a weird mix of global application settings  (under Advanced) and account specific settings (under notifications).

This is in addition to the IOS Twitter settings under System Preferences.

Why aren’t all of these settings nicely tucked into the IOS System Preferences settings for Twitter? As is, it will be really confusing for users to figure out where they should be going to tweak which settings and provides a user with two different means of adding new accounts to the application.

This is supposed to be “a faster, simpler way to stay close to everything you care about“. I think Twitter has missed that mark by a mile.

It will be extremely interesting to see how the company reacts to user feedback about these changes. At the same time, they’ve announced some pretty sweeping changes to how their website works as well. Their documentation draws some exceptionally clear parallels between the mobile app and the web app. I can only hope that their web app gets it a lot more right than the mobile app did.

My overall feeling is that they are re-arranging the UI deck chairs while skirting the more central issue of how to absorb the early user-hacks into real and scalable features within their user experience.

I suppose I could just uninstall it.

Related posts:

1. The Twitter Timeline

I received a note from Google letting me know that they’d suspended some of my ad campaigns and that I should login to rectify. Clicking through, my suspicion was raised when I wasn’t automatically logged in like I normally am. Google *always* logs me in automatically, and usually into the wrong account.

It drives me crazy.

This gave me a cause to pause and I did a deeper inspection of the page and the email I’d received.

Turns out, the email was a complete fake. A scam intended to con me into giving my Google credentials to a nefarious third party. In this case, the email sends me to google-ows.com, a name that was only registered this morning. The page includes a script that collects your adwords username and password, which can also be used to sign into my other Google services – like GMail, etc. From there, who knows what the scam is, but it sets up the bad guys some pretty good access to your life if you fall for it.

Sneaky bastards.

The contents of the email…

The page I was sent to…

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Not because of the hardware configuration – better options exist elsewhere. Not because of the software and features – again, both exist in better form elsewhere.

Distribution and Operations.

Apple has been successful with the iPad not because they invented the iPad, but because they have the right business model. Design + Technology + Manufacture + Distribution + Sales + Marketing. And they are great with each.

Amazon already very nearly does many of these things. They already have awesome Distribution + Sales and their Marketing is quickly coming up the curve. They are weak in the area of Design + Technology + Manufacture, but not nearly as bad as what we’ve seen from RIM, DELL and others. Amazon can definitely improve in these areas, and press reports lead me to believe that they are worried about the right things – learning the lessons they need to learn quickly to be competitive in the right time frame. Amazon’s track record with distribution and operations is nearly as outstanding as Apple’s.

Here’s a crazy thought. Amazon has a market cap double HP and nearly quadruple DELL. If Amazon can make a dent in the tablet market, I wonder what they could do in the mobile market with the assets of either of those two companies. Google buying Motorola might just well set the stage for a round of dizzying mega-consolidations.

Never underestimate the power of distribution.

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1. Amazon to hammer Home Depot in Canada?
2. Dumb Terminal

Guessing about how long I’d had the credit card and chequing account, I figured that they owed me at least $500 in extra charges.

I called the CIBC customer service line and after navigating their voicemail tree, pressing “1″ and “5″ and entering my account number in followed by the pound sign, as instructed, I finally got to talk to a real person. Who promptly informed me that he couldn’t help me and that I should visit my local branch.

And here I thought that my $24.50/month included telephone banking privileges.

Pressing him a little bit further, I managed to get him to transfer me to the CIBC Card Services group (which I later learned is really just a hotline to the VISA call centre).

When the next agent came on the line, I explained my issue to her for the second time. Her response was pretty surprising. In summary, she questioned why I hadn’t noticed sooner and indicated that at best, the most they would be able to refund me was $170 from the most recent statement, but only if I could get them proof in the next few days. And then she threw her colleagues at CIBC under the bus and said that they had neglected to file some important form way back when I first established the account. Somehow she intended that this would all make sense to me and that I would feel responsible for their lack of paperwork and accept the fact that VISA wasn’t going to refund me the fee’s they overcharged me.

My response, if I remember correctly, went something like…

Or maybe I just mumbled something about closing all my accounts…

Hanging up the phone, I realized that my only chance to fix this would be at the local branch. Face-to-face is always easier to get things fixed, and I have the added bonus of being out in the middle of nowhere which increases my chance that whomever I talk to will be small-town friendly.

Walking into the local CIBC branch, my fortune immediately changed. Within minutes, the teller whom I had explained the whole story to was ushering me into the branch manager’s office. I sat and waited while she made a few phone calls to VISA, shared a few puzzled glances with me while they put her on hold, and then politely explained to them why they would be immediately crediting my account $170 per year for each year I’d had the card dating back to 2004! When she finished with her phone call, she handed me her card and told me to call her if my account hadn’t been credited within 30 days, and if not, she would personally credit my account the extra fees!

I left very impressed that I had found someone who knew the difference between following policy and doing the right thing. And pretty impressed that my credit card would soon be the recipient of a nice $1400 credit!

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1. The VISA Shakedown
2. Register.com Still Playing Transfer Games 10 Years Later
3. High Tech or Hustle? Getting ahead of the pack

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1. 2 Yrs 3 Mos 3 Wks 6 Days 18 Hrs 34 Mins 59 Secs*
2. My 2010 New Years Resolutions – Internet Edition
3. The difference ten years makes

Over the years I’ve found that less is more, although I still have a long way to go before I master this. I also try really hard not to broach new subjects via email or attempt to deal with something in its entirety. Email is good for updates, reminders, organizing and small questions. Email is really bad for conversations, debates, collaboration and relationships.

I have a tendency to think I’m a really bad emailer, and once in a while I’m pleasantly surprised to learn that other people are much worse.

Take this email written by Sarah Palin for example. It breaks pretty much all the rules. I would have thought she would be a bit more savvy and avoiding sending something like this.

From: Sarah 

To: Scott Heyworth Cc: Todd Palin 

Sent: Friday, January 06, 2006 10:19 AM 

Subject: Todd’s son 

Scott: 

Todd just told me you had spoken with him awhile back and reported that some law enforcement friends of yours claimed some dumbass lie about Track not being Todd’s son? This really, really disgusts me and ticks me off. 

I want to know right now who said it, who would ever lie about such a thing this is the type of bullshit lie about family that WILL keep me from running for Governor. I hate this kind of crap. I thought it was bad enough that my kids have been lied about recently regarding illegal activities that they had NO part in whatsoever. But a stupid claim like one of our kids isn’t fathered by Todd? 

I want to know NOW what this latest b.s. is all about because I want to get to the bottom of this garbage rumor mill. People who lie like this may know me well enough to KNOW THAT I WILL ALWAYS PUT FAMILY FIRST, AND IF UGLY LIES LIKE THIS ARE BELIEVED BY ANYONE AND ADVERSELY AFFECT MY HUSBAND AND KIDS I WILL PULL OUT OF THE RACE BECAUSE IT’S NOT WORTH IT—AT ALL—TO LET MY FAMILY BE VICTIMS OF DARK, UGLY POLITICS LIKE THIS. 

Sarah

If you ever find yourself writing something like this, do yourself a favour and never send it.

No related posts.

State of mind is so important.

Noel uses the example of a tie game in football…

“Let’s say you’re behind with two minutes to go and you come back to tie the game. It almost feels like you’ve won. Right? But let’s say you’ve been ahead the whole game and you allow the opponent to tie things up in the final two minutes. Then it feels like you’ve lost. But the fact of the matter is it’s still a fucking tie. The only difference is perception.”

- Noel Gallagher, Oasis

In practice, this means knowing the difference between the past and the future. In the past, you may have been leading the game, or losing the game. Now, all that matters is that the score is tied. The only thing you can change is what happens in the future.

Whether you win or lose is very much up to you.

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Spring, 1986. I was 14 going on 15. I had just moved to a new school and had made new friends. Like most kids that age, I was starting to figure out that the world was full of all sorts of things that I hadn’t yet experienced. I tried to take in as much as I could. And in the process, I did something really stupid.

I took up smoking.

Of course, it started out almost innocently. A puff here, a puff there, but before the school year was out, I was very much a smoker and there was no looking back.

Fast forward to fall of 2002. By my reckoning, I had smoked 6.23 miles of cigarettes over a 16 year period. I had been a smoker longer than I’d been a non-smoker. I’d spent over $52,000 feeding my habit.

In mid-September, I decided to make a change for the better. I quit four times on September 12 and just as many times every day for the next ten days or so. Going cold turkey was becoming my new habit but I realized quickly that this was the only way that I was going to make my quit stick. Soon enough, where I had been slipping every few hours, I was slipping every few days.

Until December 16, 2002.

I will never forget walking up to the office that morning. I had just come from the airport, “fresh” off a red-eye from Amsterdam and I was dying for a cigarette – or so I thought. I hadn’t had one for two days at that point, so the urge to have one was pretty high. The patch had evened out the cravings, but seeing Chuck Daminato hanging around the front door of the office with a butt hanging out of his mouth was too much for me to bear. I asked him for one, he obliged and I didn’t disappoint him.

I got about half way through the smoke and realized that I really didn’t want it – but I finished it anyways. Thankfully, that was the last cigarette that I had. Today marks one year as a newly reformed smoker. I’m not past the addiction yet – I think its a lot like alcoholism. There is no such thing as an ex-smoker any more than there are ex-drunks.

My name is Ross and I’m a smoker. I had my last cigarette 365 days ago…

The last year has been good to me. Once I quit smoking it began to dawn on me that my health was my problem and I was the only one that could do something about it. In late April when I had this epiphany, I weighed 240+ pounds. I started with biking. By the end of May I had made enough progress that I knew that I needed a new bike in order to keep making gains with my health. So I bought one – and managed to put over 1200 kilometres on it between June and the end of September.

This is a far sight better than my last attempt at getting in shape – before I quit smoking. Sometime during the winter of 2001/2002 I decided that I was going to start jogging. I got suited up, headed outside and made it less than 100 yards down the street before I realized that there was strong likelihood I was going to die before I got to the end of the block. I crawled back home and didn’t talk about it to anyone.

But not this time. Quitting smoking made all the difference in the world. I bike throughout the summer and into the fall putting on anywhere between 15 and 40 km per day, five days out of seven. With the colder weather, I just moved my exercise indoors with a gym membership. I started off simply enough – just keeping up with the cycling that I had started out with. The single activity workouts didn’t last long as I started exploring new equipment. Soon enough I was lifting weights, cycling, rowing and a whole slew of other exercises.

I also adopted a new diet. Nothing faddish or anything, just good common sense courtesy of the Mayo Clinic. Lots of fruits and vegetables and not a lot of meat and empty carbs. The new menu gave me the energy I needed to do more at the gym and also got me on the track of dropping pounds.

This morning, I got up at 5am, had a banana yogurt shake and was at the gym by 6:00. After my warmup, I did 15 miles on the stationary bike and then got right into a 5 mile run. After my run, I worked through my weight routine and was back home by 8:00. When I got back, I hopped on the scale and weighed in at 189 pounds.

I’ve been a reformed smoker for roughly 6% of the time I was a smoker. I’ve saved over $3,300. I’ve probably added at least ten years to my lifespan. I no longer feel dragged out all the time, need less sleep and have a much clearer head.

Living is much more interesting than dying. I just wish that more people would clue into this.

If you want to quit and need someone to lean on, be sure to drop me a note.

Cigarette Smoking-Related Mortality (United States)

• Cigarette smoking is the single most preventable cause of premature death in the United States. Each year, more than 400,000 Americans die from cigarette smoking. In fact, one in every five deaths in the United States is smoking related. Every year, smoking kills more than 276,000 men and 142,000 women.
• About 10 million people in the United States have died from causes attributed to smoking (including heart disease, emphysema, and other respiratory diseases) since the first Surgeon General’s report on smoking and health in 1964–2 million of these deaths were the result of lung cancer alone.
• Between 1960 and 1990, deaths from lung cancer among women have increased by more than 400%–exceeding breast cancer deaths in the mid-1980s. The American Cancer Society estimated that in 1994, 64,300 women died from lung cancer and 44,300 died from breast cancer.
• Men who smoke increase their risk of death from lung cancer by more than 22 times and from bronchitis and emphysema by nearly 10 times. Women who smoke increase their risk of dying from lung cancer by nearly 12 times and the risk of dying from bronchitis and emphysema by more than 10 times. Smoking triples the risk of dying from heart disease among middle-aged men and women.
• Every year in the United States, premature deaths from smoking rob more than five million years from the potential lifespan of those who have died.
• On average, smokers die nearly seven years earlier than nonsmokers.
• Annually, exposure to secondhand smoke (or environmental tobacco smoke) causes an estimated 3,000 deaths from lung cancer among American adults.
• Scientific studies also link secondhand smoke with heart disease.

* 2 Yrs 3 Mos 3 Wks 6 Days 18 Hrs 34 Mins 59 Secs is the estimated amount of time that I actually spent puffing on the weed to the exclusion of other activities during the 16 years I smoked. In other words, “cumulative time spent smoking”.

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We had a great time. As we ate our ice cream in the parking lot of the DQ, I asked her if she remembered what she did to celebrate her birthday ten years ago. She replied that she vaguely remembered partying in a local pub, drinking one shot for each year of her life. Ouch. I thought it was a pretty funny contrast – ten years does make for quite a difference.

Its almost 9:30 as I write this, and we’re just about to bundle up and off to bed. Ten years ago, we were just getting started.

Related posts:

1. My 2010 New Years Resolutions – The Real Life Edition
2. Life in the cloud….
3. On remembering 9/11 – 9 years ago….