I often check Twitter on my iPhone. But instead of using one of the numerous Twitter clients from the app store, I’ll just load up mobile Twitter in Safari. Why don’t I use an app?

There are problems in every option available right now. In this post I’m going to comment on three iPhone Twitter experiences: mobile Twitter (m.twitter.com), and two popular apps, Tweetsville and Twitterrific.

Mobile Twitter (m.twitter.com)

Mobile Twitter, located at m.twitter.com, is the official mobile version of Twitter.com. It works fairly well as a mobile website, but it’s not iPhone optimized. The design doesn’t follow the iPhone human interface guidelines published by Apple. A few changes would improve things for iPhone users:

1. Tappable areas should be bigger. The “Older” and “Newer” links should be at least 44 x 44 (recommended by Apple).
2. The text entry box should be bigger. Falls into the above suggestion, but I think it’s so important it deserves its own mention. A bigger entry box would benefit all mobile users (the box should be a certain percentage of the screen). Right now it looks ridiculously small on iPhone, and it’s awkward to type an update into. Editing what you’ve written is a frustrating experience. This experience is so poor that I find I use m.twitter.com to read updates, but to actually send an update to Twitter, I use SMS.
3. It’d be nice to have a character counter. It’s essential, really: Twitter users need to know how much of their 140-character budget they’ve used and how much they’ve got left.

Third-party Twitter applications for iPhone: Twitterrific and Tweetsville

I’m going to compare Tweetsville and Twitterrific, which isn’t really fair, as I’m comparing the free edition of Twitterrific with a premium app, Tweetsville. But as far as I know, the user experience is the same; except the premium version doesn’t have ads, and it has the option to toggle a light background. Twitterrific is by Iconfactory, and has a free and premium version. Tweetsville is by Ed Voas, who sold the application to Tapulous. It’s a premium app with no free version.

Appearance. I’m not a fan of Twitterrific’s default appearance. The gradient background behind every single update is just something extra the app has to load, along with the text content. I don’t think it looks nice, either. Which, of course, is the real issue here. ; )

Seriously speaking, one of the things I like about Twitter is its simplicity, both in concept and visual design. Any extra graphic embellishment takes away from the simplicity and transparency. It’s worth noting that the desktop version of Twitter doesn’t even allow users to customise a background colour (the default is white). Any Twitter app should aim to load as quickly as possible, so being spare in appearance is a good thing.

Tweetsville’s appearance is simpler. It offers two display options (bubbles or no bubbles).  I think it fits better with the appearance of core iPhone apps, in both its visual design and interaction design.

Content concentration. How many updates can you cram into a single screen and is cramming content into the screen a good thing to aim for? Content in context is something designers should definitely take into consideration. Twiterrific appears to be able to fit more updates in a single screen when compared with Tweetsville, which would have the benefit of not having to scroll as much. Given the little work involved in scrolling, and how much you need to scroll anyway, perhaps it doesn’t make much of a difference. It also depends on how many people you’re following, and how much content you need to catch up on.

Tweetsville: (1) plain, (2) speech bubbles.

User experience. Tweetsville looks better than Twitterrific. Additionally, its user experience is better: it is more user-friendly, and more compliant with Apple’s human interface guidelines for iPhone, and this is shown best on the settings screens below.

Tweetsville’s settings vs. Twitterrific’s settings.

Tweetsville’s settings fills a single screen. Twitterrific’s settings fills roughly three screens. The latter offers too many options, and not all are necessary. Is the ‘Light Background’ button totally necessary in the free edition? It mainly serves as an ad for the premium edition. How come Tweetsville gets away with so few settings options?

User control: tab bar. Another good thing about the design of Tweetsville is the presence of the tab bar. The tab bar on the bottom of the screen acts like a useful frame, giving the user more freedom over where they can move within the application.

The tab bar is a great asset. Even better is the ability to edit them (which you can do, surprise surprise, by hitting “edit” on the “more” screen). This works like the tabs in the iPhone’s iPod, which draws on an established affordance (good).

Tweetsville’s custom tab bar

Progress/status bars vs spinners. When I refresh the app I want to know how quickly I’ll be able to read new updates. So I want to see a visual indication of progress.

The spinner (circled in red) doesn’t indicate its progress visually. It just tells me it’s working. Great, but how soon will I get to see my updates?!

The browser bar (also circled in red) fills up as it downloads data. It tells me that not only is something happening, it’s completing a task, and is at least a percentage through completing it.

I really like this and would love to see an app that could show this, even if it’s not accurate. Psychologically, it eases my pain by giving me the impression that something’s getting done!

While none of these experiences are perfect, the good thing about multiple options is that the designers behind them will learn from each other’s merits and mistakes and improve iteratively. Twitterrific was one of the first clients out there for iPhone and iPod touch, and Tweetsville is a fairly recent release, so the latter had more time to learn from existing apps on the market.

I hope that Twitter will make an iPhone optimized site according to Apple’s human interface guidelines, because I’d be happy to use the website. Twitter itself is extremely lightweight, so does it really need an app? Any app should reflect the lightweight nature of Twitter, and aim to keep loading time as low as possible.

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, Bryan Rieger has launched Mobile Design UK along with Priya Prakash.

Bryan has asked me to be involved too (yay!), so I’ll be writing up the first event on December 3rd at the offices of Flirtomatic in London. See full details below (or view the original post here):

“We’re happy to announce the details for the first Mobile Design UK event scheduled for Wednesday December 3rd, 2008 at the Flirtomatic offices on Great Marlborough Street. The doors will open at 6:30 and we’re aiming to get things underway by 7:00pm.

Flirtomatic
Europa House, 2nd floor
54 Great Marlborough St, London
[ view map ]

Seeing as this is our first meeting we’ve opted to keep things very casual and would like to take the opportunity to discuss what people would like to see from Mobile Design UK going forward and select a few volunteers to help ensure things do in-fact move in that direction.

That said, we have no intention of devoting an entire evening to bureaucracy and chit-chat and would like to kick things off with a few spectacular (no pressure) presentations by Mathias Dahlstrom from LastMinute.com Labs, Ali Driver from trutap and Jaseung Chang from Flirtomatic. If you’d like to present (refer to this happened… for guidelines) at a future Mobile Design UK event please get in touch either via comments on this site or the Yahoo Group.

After the meeting we’re likely to head out to The Coach and Horses for drinks nearby - if anybody has any other recommendations please drop and email to the list.

As we’ve actually had a much bigger response to Mobile Design UK than originally expected we’re going to have to ask those who are planning to attend to put their names on the sign-up list via the Yahoo Group - and we may have to either limit attendance or make other arrangements depending on the actual number of people planning to attend.

Last but certainly not least, I’d like to thank Priya Prakash and the entire team at Flirtomatic for providing us with such a fabulous location.

To register for the event please sign-up at the Yahoo Group via the following link:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/mobiledesign-uk/database?method=addRecord&tbl=1

Mobile Design UK is proudly sponsored by Flirtomatic and Yiibu.”

Hope to see you there!

I’m toying with the idea of “visual culture” of software. We have established basic affordances in software (the desktop metaphor) that haven’t changed vastly since the Graphic User Interface (GUI) was invented at Xerox PARC. Putting files into folders is something everybody understands: it’s intuitive and uses a metaphor we are all familiar with. The trend, or the noble aim, is to make software even more human, and that will be next achieved through multi-touch technology. Physically interacting with software is about as intuitive as we can get without making computers part of our brains. Multi-touch removes the barrier of using a pointing device to manipulate software.

If there is a visual culture of software, it is weird, meta, flexible, and subjective because of our power to control it, and because of the nature of how we’re viewing it. Nothing is really objective. (Sidenote: one could argue that nothing is objective anyway, as we’re using devices to view software through the frame of our own devices, our bodies, in a challenging mise en abyme of faulty hardware.)

With content aggregation, visual culture is superfluous. For example I read most blogs in my reader, where the content is taken out of visual context of the website it was originally published in. In print, content is inseparable from form. Tear up the paper pages of a book and you lose the content too, but even if you mis-link a stylesheet to an XHTML document you can still, hopefully, view the content.

The computer is just another layer of experience. Devices render websites or a programs in different ways, though designers strive to make the experience the same across devices. Another example of viewing flexibility: most software allows users to customize the placement of the elements (e.g. browser icons) if not the whole look and feel of the thing (i.e. skins, and alternative website stylesheets).

Don’t worry, this blog isn’t dead – just sleeping. I have no WiFi in my new home yet, which isn’t quite an excuse for not updating. I took a week-long break to move into my new flat, and have been amiss from most other social things too – with the exception of Playful last Friday. (See Roo Reynold’s excellent notes here.)

I’m very excited about version 2 of Trutap (keep an eye open for the launch announcement). Trutap has been taking up most of my time at Future Platforms since I joined in March. The new version was demoed this morning in the office at Future Platforms, and it’s looking great. It’s a great feeling to see all of our collaborative hard work pay off! Trutap has been a great project to work on, and is a real example of synthesis of content and digital tools. I learned a lot about visual design and interaction design in the process. I will write more about this later.

Apart from Trutap, here are other things occupying my mind and time:

• Writing. I’ve been thinking up possible proposals to submit to Eye Magazine. Writing is something I love doing and it has always been one of my ambitions. There was also a culture for writing about design at Reading University, and practitioners are also expected to be able to write and research: something I regard highly.
• Language. Stephen Fry wrote this great, meandering blessay on language, which got me thinking. I loved the introduction of translation: “English (Pirate)” on Facebook, which made me wonder if language used online is a little too sterile. Stephen makes excellent points. I’m not sure what my point is yet, but I’ll come back to it…
• Mobile design. Bryan Rieger, who I worked with at Future Platforms, and is now at Yiibu, has just launched Mobile Design UK. The aim: to be an “open forum for UK designers working with mobile technologies to share knowledge, encourage exploration of technologies, tools and ideas, and showcase the UK as an influential hub of mobile design to the world.” Exciting stuff, and I’m looking forward to being involved. If you’re a mobile designer in the UK, you should be involved, too!