Parentheticals & Excursions

A poor bit of user interface design in the twitter widget for android in an otherwise a well designed and intuitive application.

What do you think the “Update” button is going to do?

1. Submit the text in the “What’s Happening?” box?
2. Refresh the current tweets?
3. Something else…

Yes, it’s 3.

It can’t be 1. As android developers will understand, you can’t usefully put an editable text view into a widget (the Google Search is not a bona-fide widget). So the designers/developers have followed the pattern of showing the “Create Tweet” activity when the text view is clicked. This works really nicely.

And it isn’t 2 either. Even though the twitter website, and the rest of the android application, refer to the action as “Tweet”, the “Update” button does exactly the same thing here. It duplicates the action of clicking in the textbox. This is wrong on three counts:

1. The language is inconsistent with the rest of the application, for no benefit.
2. It reinforces the expectation that the text box can be typed-into, it can’t.
3. It robs the user of space to perform a useful action, like actually updating the tweet stream

What prompted me to post this is actually a second (and I feel more significant) issue with the app: there is no “About” screen, no information about how to contact the developer, not even any confirmation that it was developed or licenced by twitter.

I would have emailed my observations instead of posting them, but they weren’t courteous enough to provide their contact details.