Designing for Experience

First of all I have to address the fact that twitter has not been working especially well for me lately. I try to hit a user’s page on twitter, it won’t load about 1/2 the time. This along with periodic outages of not being able to post at all are annoying.

Now that I have that out of the way, I need to talk about the clients I have been using. I have actively and routinely used three clients in the past for twittering: gtalk, snitter, & spaz. I have or currently use the following “addons” to enhance my twittering experience: Facebook twitter app & twitterfeed. Now that I look at it, it is a little bit ludicrous how much time I spend on the whole affair, I’ll worry about priorities later.

Thinking about the user experience, what do I want from twitter? I think that I want connectedness most of all. I want a single conduit that makes me feel connected to my peers, colleagues, friends, and family (not that any of them have taken that jump yet) in social, intellectual, and emotional ways. OK clearly this is a separate post, so I’ll make it one.

What I like about each client: gtalk is immediate, when someone tweets, I get it. Other clients only connect to twitter periodically (no more than 1/min). I really prefer getting them faster. There is a downside to this: if I’m not logged in to gtalk I miss the action, I can’t come back and login and see them, I would then have to go to my twitter page. Gtalk allows twitter tracking. Tracking is an interesting feature that allows you to receive any public tweet that contains a word or phrase of your choosing. For example I have the word “informatics” tracked, and it’s interesting to see the results. No other client directly supports this in the same way.

Snitter: Snitter is an adobe air client, it is easy to use, skinnable, and the developer regularly updates and is responsive to user requests. I like that I can turn off my computer, or come in to the office in the morning log in and see what happened overnight. Many friends are up much later than I am and I can see their tweets and conversations. I like having a character count, so I know when I’ve gone over. I get the user’s pic that they have on their profile next to each tweet, and when I mouseover I get the option to direct msg, @ reply, or make that tweet as a favorite. The user name appears after each tweet, click on it and their profile pops open in the client along with all their tweets. You can easily look at your followers, who you are following all through a handy drop down menu, this is all within the client, not popping open web pages. I already have enough tabs open in FF thank you very much. On my windows laptop I can minimize to system tray, again I hate having a lot of things open. Is there anything I don’t like about Snitter? I know this is nitpicky, but I don’t like the ‘S’ logo, I’ve had problems with it in the past not remembering my user name/password, and as with all clients/twitter itself it doens’t work anywhere near all the time. Snitter allows you to search, which is kind of like faux tracking, so you can search the public timeline for words and phrases. Good, but it’s not being pushed to you. I want push.

Spaz: Spaz is also an adobe air client, It has all the goodness of Snitter, except the @ direct message and favorite are in a different place, I don’t like where they are, and I don’t like that the icon for direct message is an envelope, it makes me think I’m going to email them, and I have in fact clicked it more than once in an attempt to email someone. The reason I don’t like them there is that they seem out of place, right aligned when nothing else it. Spaz also has the character count, but doesn’t let you go over, sometimes I want to go over and if someone really wants to they can click over to the website and see the whole message. Spaz, like some other clients that I’ve heard of but not used also rewards you for tweeting at exactly 140 characters (sometimes called a twoosh) by playing a hilarious little spaz out noise. I kind of like that, it’s fun and playful. I would like to see more than one sound though. In spaz you can mouseover someone’s pic and you get their bio and location, this is OK, maybe you could have both the way Snitter allows the three icons to appear over the person AND the pop-up with their info. If you mouse over ANY @reply in any tweet you can see that person’s name, bio, location, and latest tweet, this is perfect for getting what someone is talking about when you don’t follow the person they are responding to (only works with someone who doesn’t protect their tweets of course). Sometimes this leads me to adding that person, but lately I try not to do that so much, keeping my following to people I know, people I would really like to know who work in my field, and a couple of bots (APNews, CNN, Remember the Milk).

Twitterfeed: I use this to make sure everyone who follows me knows about when I blog. It’s super simple to set up. Would love to see this functionality be built into twitter itself, but probably not a client.

FB Twitter app: This is absolutely necessary as I don’t want to update my status on FB all the time. I am not a habitual 30+ mins/day FB user, just the every other day 5 mins kind of guy. I can check up see what ppl are up to, respond to msgs and there you go. I guess this should stay the way it is.

So here’s what I want: I want the immediacy that you get with TXT and gtalk, no waiting for faux push technologies.

I want to see the person’s pic, and be able to respond to them easily. I don’t give a hoot about the favorite function, maybe someone else does.

I want to be able to see who someone is from an @reply.

I don’t want to be constantly referring to web pages, do it in the client if at all possible.

If I’m on a windows box make it minizable to systray.

I want fun and play! The noise for a twoosh is great. Keep it up.

Skinnable is almost necessary, a pleasant icon also good.

I like cross platform, adobe air is probably the way to go.

I want tracking! Not faux tracking.

I am aware that some of these issues go to how the Twitter API works, and that in order to fulfill my wishlist (not holding my breath) changes would have to happen on some basic stufff.

Looking forward to your thoughts via twitter or here.

Bloomington Startup » Blog Archive » Requesting chatter from local bloggers

OK so because of my work locations and twitter I keep pretty up to date on what is happening with Bloomington Startup Weekend (or BSW).  Interestingly I have not as of right now signed up.

Here’s why I haven’t yet: It’s a huge time commitment in some ways.  I get very little time with my family anyway, so I don’t want to miss out on that.  I won’t be there for Sunday, I don’t work on Sunday, it is a rare social function that I attend on Sundays (last Sunday being an exception for a little get together for Chinese New Year).  I don’t attend work or school functions on Sunday, it’s just how I feel about the Sabbath, and I always ask my colleagues to respect that, and I will always do my best to respect your beliefs as they intersect with our interactions.  I’m so busy with my capstone and grant work, let alone my coursework, that I don’t think I can fit another thing in.

Here’s why I WANT to sign up: It’s only ONE weekend, or in my case Friday evening and Saturday.  Start-ups are fun and exciting.  I love design and business, I’ve been involved with start-ups before, pitched to VCs and loved it.   I LOVE the idea of BSW, and if when it happens next year I’ll be there with bells on, well at least with great anticipation.  Designing something, something that will, at least to some extent, get built and right away is great.  I’m sure it will be a great experience.

In short I think that  anyone who has an interest, they may be a few spots still left. Sign up today!

Sorry everyone, I am allowing trackbacks etc, but I turned off comments until I get a fresh WP install controlled by me.  I am getting way too many comments to moderate, and they are (at least in the last 2 months) all SPAM. I hate it, but that is the way it is.

Twitter related post coming in the next 24 hours.