27. Apr. 20142 Min.
Twitter has changed the design for user profiles. That means that also the last big social media platform, that used to allow at least a bit of individual design possibilities for profiles, has adjusted towards the "normal", standardised social media designs. In the past, you had the chance to adapt your background to your corporate design for example. This possibility was killed by the design relaunch.
Similar to Facebook & Co, also Twitter uses a big banner picture for the top of each profile. This banner measures 1500 pixels x 500 pixels. Here you can see my new Twitter design as an example:
There is also a novelty with regards to tweets: The shorter the text in the tweet, the bigger the font. That means the shorter the tweet, the more it stands out. This looks like a bug and despite thinking about it, I still have not come across a reason why Twitter is doing that now. Very strange. Here you see two examples:
What does Twitter want to achieve with that? Is a short tweet automatically more important than a long tweet? Twitter seems to think so, but I don’t. As Twitter normally does great things, I cannot imagine this to be a bug, but it does look like one.
Another novelty is pinning tweets: Like on Facebook, you can now pin tweets so they appear on top of your Twitter feed. This is very good, especially for corporate Twitter accounts.
Also the way that photos/videos are displayed, is new on Twitter. When clicking on photos/videos in a profile, you see a structure similar to memory cards, that shows all photos and videos of a Twitter user. This is something that Twitter copied from Google+ after they had copied it from Pinterest.
Is the Twitter design relaunch linked to its stock market launch and to its "profit pressure"? I don’t know. What we can all see though, is that the big social media platforms are becoming more and more similar (design-wise). If you like it or not.
When thinking of other social networks, design relaunches often had to face negative criticism (at least in the beginning while users were still getting used to the new design). However, the new Twitter design has received quite positive feedback so far. And I also have to say that I really like the new Twitter design (apart from the font size "bug") – even though a lot has been copied from Facebook and Google+. So Twitter was everything but revolutionary, but they really worked hard on improving the user experience and this is what counts when it comes to social networks.