Same colored arrows point to spaces that should have the same size, because they represent the same thing.
The problem with grids is that they're a blunt instrument. You still need to use common sense. There's no conceivable reason why the "Home" button in the top bar should align to the second panel. That would seem to imply that the Home button does something to the second panel, when in fact it controls both.
1) Numbers should not be moved to the right on the titles (ie follow 87)
2) He changed the background color lighter to show more contrast on the blur, even though bg colors are customizable in twitter, thus creating an unfair comparison.
3) Top black bar items not aligning with the grid may have been intentional. It's not part of the layout but intended to be a separate object that is part of the view port. I'm sure it was intended to seem like the bar was an extension of the browser, not part of the web site. In this way, it does not distract from reading.
4) His contrast with background colors on the "tweet box" area, the feed, and the right side was done poorly, completely breaking the concept of main vs sub content on left and right. The original background colors are much better in clearly segregating left from right, and devaluing content on the right.
Designers forget (esp those with print backgrounds), UX is not simply about making things look pretty, but also being able to trigger an emotional response and create a connection with the end user.
Ironically, Doug Bowman's latest post on StopDesign talks about the Uncanny Valley. This theory applies here too. Rodrigo's design looks way too much like a static blog, and makes me feel uncomfortable.
Although aesthetically pleasing at first sight, this guy still has a lot to learn from Doug Bowman.
His design honestly looks like a Wordpress Blog theme, not Twitter.
Although I agree 100% with your critique I disagree completely with UX being about triggering an emotional response.
I know UX people like to claim they are responsible for the user experience but this is really not true unless they are able to actually visually design the site too as the visual part is the primary emotional trigger.
This is why all UX people should be able to design.
The problem with his twitter redesign isn't about the emotional response but simply about the information design. It's badly done and reduces the ability to scan the page.
I think so too. It always confuses me when I see companies look for UX and UI as 2 separate things. The more layers of designers you introduce to the process, the more likely it is for the main concept to be lost in translation. I like Twitter's model where designers work together as an extension of a Creative Director with skills in UX/UI/Front-end.
takes longer to scan. Also the inconsistency, notice on the right margin he uses numbers to represent data, then later uses it as a control link to filter / edit data. It should only be the latter.
I don't think the problem is 'to-the-right' as much as 'on-the-right-margin'. Lots of tests show keeping values closer to their labels speeds comprehension; with a left-aligned label, and right-aligned value, and varying whitespace width between, interpreting the numbers is slightly slowed. (For example, in the redesign, the number of 'Following' is actually closer to the label for 'Followers'.)
Using a 1080px grid is a big no! I assume there would be a considerable percentage of twitter web users with a 1024x screen resolution. On twitter's scale, even a small percentage(say 5%) would run into millions and showing them the horizontal bar is definitely not a good idea.
Some might also not use the full width of their screen. Is there any good data on this?
My browser window is nearly always about 700px wide – that’s half of my screen. Two-finger scrolling makes vertical scrollbars just as easy to use as horizontal scrollbars but 1000px wide designs are not optimized for 700px wide windows [+].
I certainly don‘t want websites to start using 700px wide layouts. I would, however, love to see more websites that change their layouts depending on the width of the browser. Twitter could drop one column if needed. Many browsers already make such changes easy and it is just as easy to force the common denominator layout on older browsers. That would be completely in line with progressive enhancement.
[+] To all the web designers out there: I can understand that it is not exactly your priority to make it easy for someone who like 700px wide browser windows to use the website you are designing. But could you please at least test whether everything still works even when the browser window is that narrow? I really should always be able to scroll to any button and backgrounds shouldn’t disappear.
Seriously? 700px? I realize there's a class of users that doesn't browse full-screen, and that a site with a broad an audience as Twitter is bound to encounter every variety of screen resolutions, but there comes a point where if a user elects to operate their system in a non-standard configuration they can't expect the designer to accommodate those requirements when there's already two solutions available to accommodate this choice: scrollbars and the zoom-out feature available in every browser.
While developing alternative display modes for non-standard resolutions is certainly possible, it unquestionably increases the time and expense of design, development and testing for what is arguably a negligible gains in terms of the percentage of users you're serving.
I understand that it is additional work and I really don't want to be demanding. I’m happy when a website merely works. (I’m not sure how non-standard windows not spanning the entire width of the screen are. That seems like the default behavior of any browser window on the Mac. I would love to see data.)
It‘s just that many, many websites are being optimized for low resolutions on mobile devices anyway. It would be great if that work could be repurposed for the desktop.
I think the problem here is the disconnection. According to CRAP principles (contrast, repetition/rythm, alignment, proximity) related items should be in proximity with each other.
IMHO Rodrigo's design does better on contrast & rythm but there's a disconnection between related elements which can cause confusion. If I had to solve that I should try using a light background to enclose items that belong one with another.
I think that, regardless of the results I find this kind of exercise very useful. It's very hard for someone living in Argentina (or anywhere outside SF or NY) to be commissioned with a work of this caliber, so it's very ratifying to think "Could I do it better?" even if the answer is "No, I can't"
On a related note, is good to see Bowman work again after disappearing that many years inside Google.
Here: http://www.fileability.net/snaps/twitteruneven.png
Same colored arrows point to spaces that should have the same size, because they represent the same thing.
The problem with grids is that they're a blunt instrument. You still need to use common sense. There's no conceivable reason why the "Home" button in the top bar should align to the second panel. That would seem to imply that the Home button does something to the second panel, when in fact it controls both.