Wall of Tweets: design decisions behind popular twitter wall

Wall of Tweets is twitterwall product designed and developed by full service UX consultancy FatDUX Zagreb here in Croatia. It’s very popular and used throughout the world. In this article I’d like to share some design thinking, design research and decisions we’ve put behind this product and how it compares to other solutions on the market.

Introduction

Wall of Tweets is our twitter wall solution available in two main forms – first one is simple, HTML / JavaScript widget that you can embed in your website and follow specific Twitter hashtag, phrase, user or any combination of those. It contains profanities filter and numerous other features. Simple and elegant to use, it’s the right choice for all of you looking to add Twitter wall on your website. It requires no plugins – all you need is modern web browser.

Our flagship product however is targeted to be used and displayed at the conference, events and similar venues. It’s usually run from laptop and projected on a big canvas using the beamer (projector) although some of our customers like to use plasma / LCD screens. It provides very rich informational context, attractive visuals and – what we are most proud of – it’s always unique – we work closely with you to provide you with unique, customized experience that is tailored to your event, brand and expectations. That has proven to be a major success since our clients do appreciate that extra effort we put for them and their customers (conference attendees, associates…) are really pleased.

I won’t go into too many details regarding our Wall of Tweets solution, TechCrunch has some nice words about Wall of Tweets, there’s an official Wall of Tweets website, and you can listen to the Wall of Tweets podcast we’ve had with our dear friend and colleague Jeff Parks. You can also follow the Wall of Tweets on Twitter (@WotNet)

What I want to talk about are some design decisions we’ve put in place and how did they reflect to our users and our overall success.

Content is the king, but context is the kingdom

This was the phrase I’ve heard not so long time ago, but it has served as a guideline for our product since the day one and our product planning. Twitter is cool but it can be a mess. Tweets can be lost in the sea of other tweets and limitation of only 140 characters is a challenge of its own. Using hashtags can help with that in order that it helps you filter the tweets you are interested in (given the case that their authors have used hashtag). However, even in those cases, there’s a challenge how to present those tweets using the twitter wall solutions.

We’ve set several simple and clear design goals – we must provide users with broader context, we must ensure that speakers and conference attendees are THE STARS of the conference, NOT our product, animations and transitions are nice but they should be there for just one reason – to provide clearer understanding and facilitate the context – not to serve as eye candies (we’ve seen number of paid and freely available solutions on the market using the animations as primary feature of their twitter walls. While they can be interesting to see and maybe, in some rare cases, even very attractive, they are terrible when it comes to drawing the attention from the content, speaker and the conference itself.

Also, most of them show the one tweet at the single time – either more statically or in some sort of fluid manner – again, this might look interesting, but it’s killing a context. Showing single tweet is bad idea. Twitter, as arguably other social networks, is all about conversation and communication; it’s about sharing the ideas and thoughts but – within context. Our Wall of Tweets does exactly that – we don’t use cheese animations and transitions, and we don’t show just single tweet, instead, we provide you with several tweets in a list or some other layout. Now you can see the context of each tweet, get the idea of the overall conversation and be more involved.

Conversation is always there, but we excel at showing it to you, your customers and other users.

We are not the stars – speakers are

When we are selling or giving away (we are proud sponsor of TEDx conferences and UX/UI/AI/usability/design conferences – if interested just drop me an email at vcATfatduxDOTcom) our Wall of Tweets solution we always provide our users with guidelines. Those guidelines are not obligatory but they are here to make sure that you will have best possible experience.

We suggest you to use our Wall of Tweets in front of the conference room (like in a lobby or some networking space) and not really during the presentation itself. We do support cases where you want to use our Wall of Tweets in the conference room itself but we suggest you to use it during the QnA session. Even then, our Wall of Tweets in non-intrusive, in-context solution that is situated in background allowing the real starts to shine.

Some results

We’ve conducted 12 interviews with conference organizers, speakers – presenters and conference attendees who have been exposed to our Wall of Tweets solution and other competing solutions where tweets are being shown out of context in fluid-like manner – and we’ve got some really interesting results.

In total 8 of 12 users prefer more static-like, in context display of information. They describe it as: “easy to read and understand”, “gives me better idea what’s the communication all about”, “it does not distract me or the speaker”, “ I’ve seen audience laughing and pointing fingers at dynamic tweets and not really following the speaker”, “it feels calm and I don’t feel like I have to rush to read”…

On the other side 4 of 12 describe dynamic, fluid-like layouts as “more attractive for a shorter period of times”, “huge images and avatars are cool”, “I love shiny, flashy things and this works fine for me” and last one – “I don’t care about the conferences so this is good for me to kill some time”.

When talking to conference organizers, 4 out of 5 have said that they don’t care about the underlying technology as long as it is supporting their event and their goals. Reason we asked this questions was in fact that we are using Silverlight as rich plug-in for our venue-based version of Wall of Tweets. Just 1 of them has said that he’d prefer non-plugin based version but he didn’t provide any detailed explanation why was that reason.

However, our solution will work on your Mac or PC (even on Linux using the Moonlinght) and it doesn’t care what’s your browser. Firefox? Sure. Chrome? You betcha! Internet Explorer – if you are using it – we are running on it! Safari? Of course. You get the point…

Research driven design aka Conclusion

Wall of Tweets is really interesting and popular product – but it was also a great subject for us in order to conduct serious analysis of our target user’s expectations and then to conduct fairly detailed research to understand our user’s needs and feelings about our product.

We are proud to say that we do charge for our product. We provide you with unique, customized experience and our Creative Director works with you on a day-by-day basis. You get what you pay for. And more. You need video or custom ad on your Wall of Tweets? Subtle, in-context animation? Profanities filter? Some new module developed just for you? You can have it all. We are not giving you just a twitter wall – we are giving you Wall of Tweets experience that is based on our design research and process. And since we are talking about the process – that means we are still learning and building upon that.

We’ve learned many things – and we’ve been humbled and surprised by some results. We’ve been betting on our premise that we want to give a bit more static, in-context, conversationalist layout of tweets and to deliberately dismiss fluid layouts. After research and user interviews, we’ve been happy to learn that was a good idea.

Also, we’ve had our misses – our early versions have featured chart showing the number of tweets over the course of time – users have pretty much ignored that piece of content and today it’s not a part of our standard implementation (though you can get it if you have desire for that).

Also, our innovation was to add list of “Top tweeps” – something that was pretty much put in place in order to facilitate more tweeting and some sort of competitive spirit – it was a huge hit – and it was not really used for spamming.

We’ve been really happy to see that some of our competitors have started using that (and other ideas) as well. Well, now with our design process exposed and some insights behind some of our design decisions you guys can be even more productive. As long as the end users will benefit from that, we are all in.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, or so they say, right?

Let’s keep in touch – You should follow me on Twitter now!

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