
I want to start off by saying, the new twitter homepage is a vast improvement. Despite their steps forward mainly simplifying and invigorating the design. Like so many other sites and services in their sphere they still fall victim to flat, lifeless, and infinitely uninspired homepage experiences.
Sites like twitter and facebook, second to second and minute to minute provide users with a platform to generate such a beautifully vast and unique amount of content. Yet are we still battling with designing homepages that balance the tasks of leveraging the sites interior content and not overwhelming the visitor upon arrival.
The NY Times website, and news sites in general are a good place to look for inspiration. Most frequently with periodicals they use the cover in print or the homepage in web to engage the viewer or catch their eye. Services like twitter owe it to themselves to offer up a more profound and enticing homepage. Arriving on their homepage and seeing a few favicons of famous people is not enough of a reason for me to signup and become a user if I were not already using their service. Lets look at Evernote for a moment. They are different because their product functions in a completely different space and purpose, however almost immediately upon arriving at their site I know what the application is, what it does, and I have pretty good understanding of it’s interface.
So one major argument that comes to mind is, how many people still access twitter through the web? Since the release of new twitter the number of users of the browser based application have definitely risen and I know I am not the only person of the opinion that new twitter is the most rich and intuitive way to access your stream. This statement goes for third party apps as well. Sorry guys.
As more and more people shift over to using mobile technologies is this a change or area worth exploring? Any chance to more directly or thoroughly engage a new or potential user should be exploited. And if that means finding new ways of displaying content, whether it be some javascript trickery or something simpler. The solutions are out there.