Category Archives: User Experience

Happy Birthday Twitter

User Experience, ,

It has been a minute since I last posted here. Ironically, I’ll soon be reusing the technique that I wrote about in that last post.

I just wanted to take a moment to note Twitter’s 20th birthday is today – the first tweet was sent at 1:50pm on March 21st, 2006. Take that time with a grain of salt. I’m not sure of the authenticity, but I must’ve seen it somewhere because I actually noted it in my calendar. Likely you can still see Jack Dorsey’s tweet to verify, but I won’t bother. I try to stay off that site as much as possible these days. I won’t go into the details here any further than the site lost its way when it was sold and we’re still dealing with the fallout to this day.

One thing that most folks might not know about me is that I’m a student of cultures. I kinda minored in social sciences at college, which was the same time that the internet really started to take off. Being an early internet developer and hobby sociologist during the social media wars was an interesting time. It was fascinating to see how each network had its strengths and weaknesses and how users cobbled each network together to craft the social presence they wanted to consume and portray.

Facebook was an early entrant and quickly became the 300lb gorilla of the group, but did you know (or recall) that Facebook didn’t start with a feed? Initially, it was just about making connections (or Friends). One could update their status, but when you changed the status text, it was gone forever.

I wasn’t on all the networks then (or now), but in my view Twitter was the first social network to introduce the concept of a “feed” as we know it today. No one knew what to do with it. The concept of uttering the thoughts in your head or capturing the view in front of you was so novel that most mocked it at first (myself included). Endless photos of what people were eating became a popular theme of posts (and of ridicule). However, a few “killer features” of the format quickly emerged.

One feature was how quickly someone could source news and information from around the world. If one were to view the general feed, they could learn of major events like earthquakes, etc. hours before they showed up in any online news source.

Another feature was that one could interact more closely with those they were connected with. Life became a shared experience where you were taking in the experiences of your social circle simultaneously, a phenomenon wasn’t read-only. This enabled a type of real-time interaction that hadn’t been possible. Depending on the types of folks you were following you could be involved in conversations about the latest scientific discovery as easily as reviews of the latest blockbuster movie as easily as the latest news from the family reunion.

Other social networks took note of the engagement Twitter’s feed was driving and quickly integrated their own version into their platform. Some worked, many failed, but the social feed was here to stay. It has become a foundational piece of any and all social media platform and I believe we have Twitter to thank for it.

The beauty is in the queue

User Experience

In the lead up to Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service ending this week I’ve read several articles noting its pending death and marveling at the 1.5 million that still subscribe to the service. Can you imagine *waiting* for a movie to arrive?! Why would anyone do that with today’s myriad of choices offering on-demand access to nearly any title you can imagine?

Some have pointed to the fact that Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service offers a wider selection of titles than their streaming side does. This is certainly a draw as they aren’t hindered by the licensing agreements (or lack thereof) that have carved up the streaming landscape into a hodgepodge of walled content gardens. Titles are usually visible on the DVD site as soon as you hear of them on a late-night show or read that they won an award at a film festival.

Others have speculated that the remaining subscribers must be fearful of change or unable to successfully stream video for some reason. While this is less and less the case, these users surely still exist with high-speed internet still not universally available.

For me, there is actually one killer feature that is so overlooked that we have to excuse the writers for missing it, as even today’s streaming services have failed to recognize its greatness – the queue. A queue is more than just a list. It’s an *ordered* list that can be curated both for content and sequence. The queue is what enabled Netflix to slay the video store as it eliminated the need to wander aisles looking for what to watch that night. You setup your queue and the movies you wanted to see were sent to you as soon as they were available.

Today’s streaming services typically feature a list you can add titles to, but few-if-any offer the ability to prioritize your queue. What’s worse is that many of the most popular services are actually making your list harder to find, instead pushing the latest releases or suggestions their algorithm has come up with.

In the rush for each content provider to build out their own streaming platform, they have all failed to center the user’s experience in their design process. When competition starts to thin the streaming provider heard, I suspect the first one to refocus their efforts on the user will again rise to the top. Time will tell.