Twitter Aims For A Consistent User Experience With Display Guidelines

Twitter recently sent out an email to 3rd party developers in the hopes of designing a more unified Twitter experience.

According to dev.twitter.com:

“Users must have a consistent experience wherever they interact with Tweets, whether on Twitter.com, a mobile client, website, or in an application developed with the Twitter API. To ensure consistency across the platform and ecosystem, we’ve put together the following Display Guidelines for developers to implement when creating experiences with Tweets and Timelines. “

Guidelines For A Consistent Experience

The folks over at Twitter want to make sure that if you see a Tweet anywhere, you know it’s a Tweet.  That means display guidelines for Twitter owned and 3rd party apps alike. So, if you’ve started to notice tweets looking the same no matter what app, here is what the guidelines are for a single tweet:

A) The Tweet author’s avatar must always be displayed.

B) The author’s name and @username must be displayed next to the avatar.

C) The @username must always be displayed with the “@” symbol.

Also…The avatar, name, and @username must all link to the user’s Twitter profile

There are also specific guidelines for a tweet as part of a timeline:

Tweet from inside MarketMeSuite

A)The user’s name and @username should be displayed on one line, with the name first.

B) The avatar must be positioned to the left of the name, @username, and Tweet text

C) Tweet timestamp should be displayed in the top right corner

D) For Tweets that have been sent in the last 24 hours, use the short form timestamp, for example “20s” for a Tweet sent 20 seconds ago, “3m” for 3 minutes ago, “5h” for 5 hours ago.

Also… Tweets older than 24 hours should show a short form date including the day and month, e.g. “6 Jun”.

What do you think?

We recently updated MarketMeSuite’s Inbox For Social℠ to match these guidelines and so far had a really good response. In fact, it was the catalyst for a complete rethink of the User Interface and we are really pleased with the results! What do you think? Do you appreciate a consistent experience or will you miss the days each app took it’s own approach to how tweets were rendered. I’d love your thoughts and comments.