The Design Thinking Behind Twitter’s Revamped Profiles

A short post on the 2014 Twitter redesign and what museums could learn from it. April 10, 2014

The J.J. Pickle Federal Building in downtown Austin, Texas. Original image from Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress collection. Sourced from rawpixel

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The Design Process Behind Twitter’s Revamped Profiles - Wired

There’s a lot for us in museums to learn here. Twitter, as a user experience, is such a unique case, as described in this article. Probably 90% of its use comes from people who only see Twitter as a timeline, but the profile page redesign was done to accommodate an entirely different type of user–the one who only visits isolated people’s pages intermittently. The redesign obviously came from watching behavior patterns, which is something we could stand to learn more from. I’m often struck by how similar most museum websites are to one another (just do a quick look at the main nav from a random sampling of 20 museum websites–they’re pretty much all the same), despite those museums having wildly different audiences, different collections, different geographic constraints, what have you. I would love to see us take more of the approach that Twitter is taking here–discovering new user behaviors, and designing to fit those.

Next post: Have museums always been “authoritative?”

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