I joined Twitter in 2013 to help bolster their prototyping efforts. Earlier that year, I had published videos online on how to use Quartz Composer to bring static designs to life without using any code. It spearheaded the trend and process that is now so common among designers' workflows.
Direct messages: Share Tweet
In 2015, we noticed a growing shift toward private communication on the platform. Direct messages were becoming increasingly popular. We wanted to explore ways to help users frame conversations around tweets, with a simple goal: create an easier entry point for sharing tweets in direct messages
A stretch goal for this work was to explore a new communication layer that could sit above the interface as a means for users to see their connections in a visual way that felt as organic as possible
Above: Triggered by a new action on tweets, a layer appears above the users timeline with a list of people they have recently messaged.
Below: A prototype I built in Objective-C and our proprietary animation framework. Most of this was inspired by my prior explorations, but pushed more on the organic nature of the avatars appearing and disappearing.
Pull to refresh
Pull-to-refresh was a project that spanned my entire time at Twitter. At various points in time, I would pick it back up, only to be pulled into other projects.
Below you'll see a few playful ways in which I pushed the interaction towards something that would hopefully delight the user with something unexpected.
The first exploration is taking the humble spinner and transforming it into a confetti burst. The big challenge with this interaction was to finding something that could work across all page types
A few more explorations…
Left: A playful take on the chevron icon; it's shape lends itself well to communicating progress on drag and can be repurposed as a spinner during loading.
Right: An exploration in how we could have used the status bar to communicate to the user in a very literal way as well as using blocks of color to replicate a slot machine in an attempt to marry function with delight.
