One of the hardest things about designing web applications is presenting the multitude of types of information that is necessary at any one time. What do you display? What do you leave out? What information is more or less important than other information? If a piece of information is actionable, how do you visually inform the user of that?

Recently Twitter redesigned their interface using a new 2 panel layout where the sidebar dynamically changes, allowing for deeper inspection into the tweets that show up in your timeline. From a design standpoint there are a number of things that are great about this. The proportions (using the golden ratio) are excellent. The metaphor of a slide out panel is excellent. The exprience over “old Twitter” for reading conversation is vastly better.

However, there are 2 things that specifically bug me about the new design:  what I’d call the over stylization of the content and an over abundance of information.

This is a conversation in the side panel between two people I know. The first problem is that I think this is too much information. Here is what I see here: close link with icon, 3 tweets in two distinct styles with avatars, usernames, real names, timestamps, API client names and conversation links that link to the same conversation I’m viewing. There is also a user profile, which is in the same style as a tweet except the user’s bio is in italics. There is also links to use the original tweet in all the functions Twitter provides and the panel even goes on to list out other tweets from @bleything, however I have chosen to crop those out. Keeping in mind that my original intention was to view a conversation, and I came upon that conversation by clicking on a link in a original tweet, my goals are fulfilled but I’m also bombarded with more extraneous information than the original conversation contained.

Second, although there are probably less than 1000 characters here, and less than 420 characters of the information I requested when I wanted to view the conversation, there are no less than 12 distinct combinations of font weight, color and size.

Lets compare this with a “conversation view” from the Echofon Mac desktop app.

I find Echofon’s conversation much easier to read, and if I want more information, such as the API Client used to post the tweet or the user’s bio, I don’t mind digging deeper through the pathways I already know exist in the app. If I like to do something with one of the tweets, hidden controls appear when I mouse over. And even though there are graphics, the UI here is cleaner and only contains 2 text styles.  Literally every piece of information or action provided in the new Twitter conversation is accessible via either 1 mouse click or hover.

Designing applications is always about more than what the app look like. It’s how the app works, what information it presents, and making sure the user can easily and clearly achieve their goals.