“Twitterative Design”

Jakob Nielsen recently ran a Twitter post through 5 rounds of iterative design to get the impact he wanted. At first blush I was thinking, “That sounds like a lot of effort to optimize a Tweet!” But if you are using twitter as a marketing medium, I guess it makes sense. (Far as I can tell, these were just design rounds; he wasn’t running a user study or anything.)

See his article for lessons learned in each round, from concision to focus, impact, and re-tweetability. (There, I’m making up new words right and left.)

He finishes the article with a notable quote: “Text is a UI. It’s a common mistake to think that only full-fledged graphical user interfaces count as interaction design and deserve usability attention. ... In fact, the shorter it is, the more important it is to design text for usability.”

posted by Ted Boren on Monday, Aug 24, 2009
tagged with twitter, text, design, usability