Improving Tweet threads

 
 

OVERVIEW

Twitter has not evolved the composer in quite some time, and customers faced some friction points. The team was tasked to reduce threading friction by improving the usability of its entry point.

The team explored opportunities to improve the discoverability of Threading in the composer with helper text or a new interaction pattern for threads.

THE PROBLEM

Customers don’t know how to start a thread when composing a tweet.

It’s hard for them to find the “Add a thread button” icon in the composer action bar. Many customers believe they must reply to their tweets multiple times to start a thread by adding “1 of x” to their Tweets.

 

My ROLE

Lead Product Designer

DESIGNERS

Emma Lundin, Artem Artemov, Tegan Mierle & Matt Walker

PROJECT MANAGERS

Christina Milan

 

THE PROCESS

Defining the problem 
How might we make the entry point to threads more straightforward for our customers so that they know how to start a thread from the composer.

Research 
From research, we know that we currently have about a 67-71% success rate of customers knowing how to start a thread from compose. The rest have no idea or use other ways to create multiple tweets to tell longer stories.

Audit 
We needed to understand what patterns our competitors use in their composers to clarify all the options a consumer has when composing a post. 

Design principles
We established principles that would guide our decisions: intuitive, helpful, and global.

 
 
 

Explorations

We explored a vast amount of directions, including a complete redesign of the composer.

 
 
 

PROPOSED SOLUTION

The auto-thread solution
Propose we explore adding a tweet prompt that auto-populates the composer. Visually smaller to indicate it’s an action yet to be taken and secondary to the main action of writing the first tweet.

We want a more intuitive version of composing a thread experience that isn’t reliant on an icon in the compose bar. We can achieve this by having a defined character count trigger a tweet prompt that auto-populates the composer with “add another tweet”.

 
 
 

User research findings 

We held user research with customers who had previous knowledge of where to find the “thread” feature before the session.

After the session, participants verified this was a helpful feature, allowing users to continue their thought in one threaded message easily. Most envisioned using this feature if they had a need moving forward.

We were also able to get a signal on the right character count trigger for auto threads and the possible combination of both auto-population and user education in the form of an inline callout.

 

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