Today’s User Experience Rant: HootSuite

HootSuite, my preferred Twitter client, recently upgraded their app with several new features, some UI tweaks and a few minor design changes. The long-awaited and highly-anticipated updates were the LinkedIn, Facebook and Ping.fm integrations as well as Twitter Lists. What prompted me to write this post, however, was a single subtle change that I imagine many users might not catch. But being the type of UX guy that I am, it drove me a little nuts. I’m referring to the updated character count of the twitter posts.

Back in the good old days of the last few weeks, the character count worked like this:

1. The count was set at 140 by default.
2. As I typed in my tweet, the count decreased.
3. If I went over the 140 character limit (past zero), the count changed to a negative number and the background color turned red.

Simple and straightforward. The user is notified how many characters they have to work with at any given moment plus a visual and numerical indication when they’ve gone over the limit. If I’m tweeting about that funny thing my dog did last night, I probably shouldn’t include the part about him burying my shoe if I’m approaching zero.

After the recent upgrade, HootSuite flipped the character count to increase as a person typed instead of decreasing it. Now it works like this:

1. The count is set at zero by default.
2. As I type, the count increases.
3. If I go over the 140 character limit, the background color turns read but the count keeps increasing.

This may not seem like much at first glance, but it does have some implications.

You’re Making Me Think
One of the great books on usability is “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug. As you could probably gather by the title, the foundation of usability is to not force people to think – about where things are, what to do and how. The original count down let me know exactly how many characters I had left, leaving me free to tweet, tweet, tweet. If I wanted to leave 25 characters for effective re-tweeting, the number 25 would display. If I went over the 140 limit, a bold negative number displayed with a bright red background like a big stop sign.

Now, HootSuite is forcing me to calculate how many characters I have left. Yes, I understand this is not a complex algorithm, but I still have to stop my train of thought for a split second to figure it out in my head. While this isn’t an abandon point for most users, that distracted split second is still frustrating. And given the frequency and speed at which people tweet, these bits of frustration could accumulate and eventually be associated with the HootSuite brand itself.

Is This a Good or Bad Thing?
When the user goes past the 140 character limit, the background turns red as the count continues to increase. And with no other indicators, what does this actually mean? The experienced user understands because they know Twitter, not necessarily the HootSuite application itself. The new or infrequent user, however, is left to figure it out on their own. I imagine an internal conversation would go something like this:

“The background color just turned red. Is this a good or bad thing? I know red usually means stop or warning, but does it mean that in this case? There are no messages saying I did something wrong and no instructions on how to do it right. The character count keeps going up, so maybe it’s nothing. I guess I’ll keep typing.”

Other Issues

While I’m on a roll, here are a few more:

Selecting a Social Network
Most of the social networking apps now allow you to post to different social media sites – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. – at once by simply selecting which ones you want to post to. Makes sense. But what if you only have one Twitter account? The assumed interaction is that Twitter, the only option available, would be selected by default. That’s not the case.

For every new tweet and RT, I have to click on my twitter avatar before I can post. If not, I get this colorful, informative reminder to do so. Given that the posting behavior for most twitter apps is to type, hit the keyboard’s enter key and move on as quickly as possible, I usually find myself a few minutes later saying, “It didn’t post? I wonder why. Oh.” followed by some aggravated mutterings.

Follow and Unfollow
Since remembering who I’m following is quickly becoming a lost cause, I usually figure it out by viewing a person’s profile via HootSuite’s modal window. Unfortunately, there’s still no way to tell if I’m following this person or not. The problem lies with the “Follow” and “Unfollow” buttons. Since both buttons are visible in an active (clickable) state, it doesn’t tell me anything. Once I click either one of the buttons, a success or error statement appears. The issue is that I actually have to take the action of clicking a button to find out. But at least I have a 50-50 shot of getting it right.

The good news is that the solution for HootSuite is a simple one – disable or remove the button that doesn’t apply. Don’t show me an error message that says “You may already be following this person.” Remove/disable the follow button so I understand that I’m following this person at first glance. As a result, I never again have to take the initial action to get that fun error message. And if you’re trying to follow yourself for some unknown reason, you can’t. So also remove/disable both buttons for a person’s own profile.

The bad news is that it might be a while until we see this update. In the meantime, you’ll have to click on the person’s twitter page link like the rest of us to figure out if you’re following them.

In Closing

My intention here is not to nit-pick through each pixel of HootSuite. This is my preferred Twitter client, so they must be doing something (many things) right. My intention, besides venting a little, is to show that even minor interactions have an effect on the overall experience of an application. As designers. UX’ers, developers, etc., we should pay as much attention to the smallest details as we do the broadest strokes.

OK, I feel better now. What do you think? Comment and let’s discuss.