Looking at the details of a tweet has become… cluttered. There are so many metrics above and below the contents of the tweet, it’s really spun the heads of anyone who cares about good design.
While it may have been great for those of us who just love metrics and wanted them set aside for their own glorious screen space, Twitter seems to agree with those of us who want something much simpler. Enter tweet details 2.0.
Andrea Conway, a designer at the company, took to the social media site earlier today to share a preview of what tweet details will look like in the future. As you can see from the screenshot below, the view count and the date of the tweet have been moved to the top. All of the metrics, like how many replies the tweet got, how many times it was retweeted or quoted, how many times it was liked, and how many times it was bookmarked, have been moved next to the buttons to actually perform those actions.
With this new design, there will be some things missing from the details of a tweet. The first is the time that the tweet was created, but that will still likely be shown on the For You or Following feed (that’s my best guess, anyway). In addition, the location has been dropped from the details view. It’s unclear if that has been removed altogether from the app. The final change is that quotes and retweets, which are currently shown separately in terms of metrics, have been combined into one.
This is a good quality of life improvement for Twitter, especially on smartphones. While having all of this information broken out was generally fine for the desktop and tablet, it really looked clunky and took up too much screen space on smartphones. There’s currently no indication of when we can expect the new tweet details view to launch but, being that Twitter’s designer is already teasing the experience, they must be settled on it so hopefully it will launch soon.
While Twitter looks to clean things up, Threads is trying to launch a slew of features for its app as the company begins to calm down from last week’s hype. Many of the features that have been promised, of course, are features that have already launched on Twitter — some of which have been on the service for years.