In “How Twitter could lose the game by design” Michael Baron presents an impressive list of Twitter’s user interface sins.
On the one hand he’s totally right. On the other hand, it just doesn’t matter.
I’d argue that Twitter’s downtime is a far worse problem than their bad UI. For the past 3 weeks or so the TwitterAPI has been failing intermittently, which means that Twitterfon and other Twitter clients break. Terrible as that is, it just doesn’t matter.
What’s sick is that intermittent downtime actually makes Twitter more addictive. I keep hitting the Twitterfon refresh button, hoping that this time it will work, just like a rat mashing the food pellet button in a Variable Intermittent Reward experiment.
This is why web design is dead: Human psychology is far more powerful than design and usability.
- We keep shopping at Amazon because they already have our credit card on file.
- We’ll never prefer Mahalo or Wikia to Wikipedia because we know that since Wikipedia is made out of love, it’s better than other wikis made out of money.
- We’ll never quit Twitter because it’s addictive, but also because that’s where we’ve built our highly curated web of relationships.
- Mac switchers will never go back to Windows because humans go to insane lengths to justify costly decisions.
So if I’m right about all this, then why does anyone ever switch from Windows to Mac or from MySpace to Facebook? Stay tuned for Web Design is Dead, part III.
Related Post: Web design is dead, part I.
Notes:
- Others are starting to notice that web design doesn’t really matter. Check out these related posts by Farhan Lalji and David Airey.
- I got the above “why people stick with cults” example from Robert Cialdini’s excellent book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Everyone should read it if only to inoculate themselves against marketing.