At Twitter I dedicated my time to features that would help the app look and feel better regardless of your country, the speed of your internet connection, the age of your phone, how able-bodied you are, or how much the trolls want to yell at you.
Twitter is optimised for best-case scenarios, but I'm a lot more interested in designing for the worst-case ones.
Posting a tweet is deceptively complex! What happens it takes a long time because of spotty bandwidth? What if something goes wrong? What should happen if someone is in airplane mode? The old system was causing all sorts of problems, so I was asked to redesign it.
The result is deceptively simple. We post a greyed out version in the timeline (referred to internally as a “ghost tweet”) and once it's successfully uploaded, it turns into a real tweet. Shout out to my engineering team who sweated the details over six months to get this launched!
Twitter’s slogan is “What’s Happening?” yet Twitter’s interface has historically felt static and unchanging. I designed some subtle animations to bring a feeling of vibrancy to actions happening on the platform, and over a year later it shipped! It took a rewrite of a lot of fundamental logic in the system, and immediately made a positive impact.
Microsoft wanted to ship Twitter by default in Windows 10’s Start Screen, so I spent several months designing the best way to take a mobile-centric app and make it look great in Windows’ new design system. I then handed the project to the amazing Angela Lam who led the first release and many versions afterwards.
Material Design made a huge impact in the design community when it came out, but Twitter was very slow to embrace it. I spearheaded the Material redesign of the app, and after the first big release I handed it off to a wonderful Android team who turned it into what it looks like today.
Twitter sucks at abuse.
So in 2016 I was thrilled to join the team as the lead designer, working most closely with one other designer, three PMs, and an engineering lead. Here are two big things I worked on directly amongst a list of about a dozen other initiatives the team took on.
In a 2016 brainstorm, my PM asked me why people couldn’t hide replies to their own Tweets as a way to reduce harassment and abuse. Almost 4 years later, the feature finally shipped. This feature was my baby, and I worked on the design and advocacy of it for more than a year. It was a joy to work on a feature that was so difficult, a perfect storm of technical, policy, UX, and ethical issues.
We knew from the data that most abuse happened in people’s notifications, so we felt strongly that we’d need to provide as many filtering options as possible to return control to them. This was one of those features that most people don’t need, but the people who do need it consider it essential.
The first two items, Tweet Submission Flow and Live Pipeline, were designed entirely by me with a fantastic engineering team backing me up. The next two, Twitter for Windows and Twitter for Android, were started by me but shipped by two other designers and their awesome teams.
I worked on Hide Replies for about a year, but it didn't ship until about three years later, which was entirely because of the efforts of the Health & Safety team still at Twitter. Finally, Safety Center was something I championed and led the design of, but it took an enormous team to get it out the door. I couldn't have made any progress without every single one of them.