Twitter launched a fairly significant redesign to its interface and hopes to catch more users and keep them longer. The company looks to broaden its appeal by simplifying its process for new users while providing a more robust platform. The new design puts ease of use front and center, an effort to bridge the gap between power users and inexperienced “newbies.” The interface change moved rhe tweet stream over to the right bar and slide the “profile and trend bar” to the far left.
Twitter should be usable for people who know the shortcuts and also equally usable for those who don’t,” said Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter’s three co-founders and current chairman. “It’s not just a visual redesign but a conceptual redesign to make Twitter more accessible to the next billion users,” said Satya Patel, a Twitter senior executive, at an event inside the company’s future headquarters in an Art Deco building in a blighted, San Francisco neighborhood.
The revamped home page is now topped with three icons: Home, “@Connect,” and “#Discover.” Twitter seeks to rebrand the two most commonly used site functions — the at sign (@) and the hashtag (#) — making big strides in reducing the learning curve.
On the Home page, the overall feed is much more user-friendly and Facebook-like than before. Photos and videos show up within tweets and all information is presented in an easy-to-understand format. The other major development are brand pages to create “an even more compelling destination on Twitter for their brands,” as it sets its sights on long term monetization of the service. The redesign also makes several changes to the new user experience in order to make discoverability process easier for the new guys.
Business customers visiting Sprint.com will see a number of changes including a redesigned Business homepage at www.sprint.com/business. Visitors will find new pages with information on devices, services and solutions tailored for businesses of all sizes across a number of industries. Small business customers will be able to buy phones, tablets and mobile broadband devices in the new online store; and purchase pre-built solution packages that combine the best in mobile devices, accessories and plans in a streamlined shopping experience. Customers researching machine-to-machine solutions, converged solutions, information on mobile and cloud applications or business discounts will also find new pages and resources that help them learn more about how Sprint helps businesses get work done.
All visitors to sprint.com will see an update to the top navigation bar with two new tabs that allow visitors to switch quickly between personal and business sections of the site. An updated Contact us page provides a cleaner view of important phone numbers and enhanced chat features to make it even easier to get help when it’s needed. The new design is another reflection of Dan Hesse’s mantra to “simplify the customer experience” at Sprint.
Sprint Business online - new re-design live
Disclosure: I am the Manager of Online Strategy for eBusiness and eCommerce at Sprint. Blog contains own opinions.
Been researching social media lately in order to devise a B2B plan overall. Here are some of the social media resources I have been using for information and news.
Its been a busy month already at the online cribb.
Mashable Reports: Twitter has acquired comment tracker turned social analytics platform BackType for an undisclosed amount. On the BackType blog, the company says the team and IP will move to the Twitter platform group. Here, the BackType team’s focus will be on “developing tools for Twitter’s publisher partners.”
CNET News reports: In a battle of apps, HBO Go and Hulu Plus can’t keep pace with reining champion Netflix. (The numbers on the left reflect the number of the rankings for each period.)The research firm’s report collects the rankings for each of the companies’ apps once a week. Strategy Analytics’ data from May 2 to June 20 showed Hulu Plus to be well behind Netflix and HBO Go in popularity. Some observers suspect that Hulu Plus has failed to catch on with consumers. One of the top complaints about the service is that Hulu Plus charges a monthly subscription in addition to requiring users to watch ads. Netflix offers unlimited viewing for a similar price, but it is ad-free. Hulu’s struggles may may be among the reasons owners Disney, News Corp., and NBC Universal are trying to sell the service.
Onlinecribb reports: Google + is finally out but for private invitation only…Still waiting for mine. Its pretty exciting for users to be giving the service praise in the first week that it has been out. Google is overdue for a hit in the social media scene after buzz and the other one that I have totally forgotten the name of.
Check out more online at : https://plus.google.com/up/start/?sw=1&type=st
Stumbled on this totally cool dynamic galaxy view. The swf file shows the planets and moons moving around their resepected object in space. It is coupled with a speed switch and time indicator. Way cool. Great job on this piece from Dynamic Diagrams. I just love these types of info graphs and dynamic renderings.
Been researching best in class microsites and contemplating the effectiveness of agency created microsites. Some rich media concepts for corporations call for a desired separate microsites to convey a message , product and or solution. Some work and some don’t. I believe its all in the way you organize the design and the connection points. Nike recently rolled out one of many for a better world… This is a rich media environment built to build the message around the product and its connections with the world. This site uses layers and different speeds on the scrolling. The unique layering technique give the site a 3D feel which is all the rage. The connection points lead to some separate nike product sites built for emersive video messaging. Thanks Nitro team for a great week with the creative concept charge and recommending the site.
I saw another neat layer effect recently on the think geek site. They make good use of the left and right space in the background on a centered site layout. At the end of your scroll it fades to a different scene. Nice use of simple layers to create visual spaces that capture a sense.
We are so used to the old browser wars where IE , Firefox, Chrome battle it out over market share but with mobile and social networking gaining popularity there is a whole new crop of browser wars starting. In the mobile field Opera/Opera Mini and Skyfire are beginning to play a bigger part in our browsing lifestyle. Check out a list from about.com of mobile browsers.
In the social networking field, there are a couple of new upstarts this year putting an interesting new twist on the browser interface of Chrome. The new browsers are RockMelt and Flock. RockMelt access is based on your Facebook login. You download it, you use your existing Facebook username and password, and you’re ready to get your social on. Flock doesn’t require you to create a new Flock account, although you have to be able to synchronize your data across computers. Both browsers synchronize your data to the cloud, so there’s no hassle to use either one on multiple computers. RockMelt wins on strategy for cutting out the registration process but, is currently restricted by invitation.
Twitter is rolling out a redesign being dubed the new twitter. The main focus of the redesign is that you will now find @mentions, retweets, searches, and lists just above your timeline – creating a single, streamlined view on the left of the screen. On the right, you can see the features you’re familiar with, including whom you recently followed and who recently followed you, favorites, and Trending Topics. The redeisgn centers on a two panel view that makes it easier to view multimedia and content that people are tweeting about. Good redesign for what people really use twitter for.
Ran across this totally awesome site. The youtube time machine. This is a brillant idea to wrap a popular site with conceptual interface and let the user base populate it. Go Web 3.0.
You could read a boring old list of the web’s most popular website — or you could check out this sprawling infographic by Nmap.It was created by using a web script to scrape the favicons of the world’s most popular websites, as ranked by Alexa. Then, those favicons were scaled according to the amount of traffic that site gets. The largest icon is, of course, Google. I love these slick type mashups to convey a message and/or information. Although the viewer does not seem to be working at the time of this post in IE… but seems to work fine in firefox.
