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Retweet with Media
Senior Product Designer
August 2018 - October 2020
Twitter is a global social media platform that serves the public conversation around breaking news, entertainment, sports, politics, and more. At my time at Twitter, I've had the pleasure to work on many different projects across a few teams, including the Creation / Conversations and Identity / Health teams.
Retweet with Media
In May 2018 my team launched the ability for users to add media to their Retweets and changed the game.
Framing the Problem
User Problem
When it comes to contributing to the public conversation, users have fears of judgment and being the target of trolls / abuse. These fears lead users to feel more comfortable adding their reaction to an existing Tweet vs starting a conversation. At the time, Retweet with comment were restricted to text and users were asking for the ability to add media to Retweets.
Business Problem
Looking at the metrics, original Tweet creation were down. Replies were the most common type of contribution to the conversation. However there was a steady increase in Retweet with comments being created, which suggested that there was an opportunity to invest in this type of content to increase contribution on the platform.
Hypothesis
We believe by allowing users to add media to Retweets they will have more ways to express themselves, we will temper fears of judgement, we will remove the barrier to add to the conversation, and ultimately increase the number of Retweets on the platform.
Design Challenge
We knew we wanted to reduce user's fear of contributing to the conversations and give them more ways to express themselves. However just adding media to the existing Quote Tweet anatomy created a lot of challenges. There were comprehension and hierarchy issues, that made it hard to know who said what. This image illustrates the out-of-the-box experience if we didn't make improvements.
Entrypoint Exploration
We explored three different entrypoints. The first was the standard menusheet where we tested different CTAs and icons. The second was a hybrid of halfsheet and a composer. The third was by passing the menusheet and dropping the user directly in the composer where they could Retweet immediately or add media.
Tweet Anatomy Exploration
We knew since the out-of-the-box experience of having two Tweets stacked on top of each other, created comprehension and hierarchy issues, we were going to need to design a condensed inner Tweet. We explored a few different options, which we then tested them with users in a moderated session.
Final Design
Box layout: We chose the box layout over the pull quote line. This pattern already existed in our system and it scaled better.
Avatar: We included an avatar to help with scan-ability, comprehension, and hierarchy.
Timestamp: We included a timestamp to help reduce the spread of outdated content and/or misinformation.
No Expand Inline: While the expanding of the inner Tweet inline preformed well in a qual session this work was out of scope.