best practices for designing third party applications for contextually-aware tools
This experience report examines the user interface designs of Twitter and selected third party Twitter applications: Tweetdeck and Brizzly. Since participants are using different tools to communicate across the same system, Twitter users have different communication expectations. Evaluating Twitter and these tools based on usability heuristics found in activity theory and Morville's notion of findability, we argue for the normalization of these tools based on a set of mental models and affordances for Twitter. From this basis, we will report on how third-party clients more effectively exploit Twitter's affordances by making the streams, and thus the user's experiences, modular, emergent, and contextual. By comparing the UIs of Tweetdeck and Brizzly, along with that of Twitter's own web-based UI, we will assess how these clients allow participants to adapt Twitter streams to their own communication needs. The flexibility given to users via such clients serves as a tremendous signpost to the nature of and need for modular, context-aware experiences in communication channels as information content evolves. Not only do the social networks themselves need to be articulated and modular, but so do the UIs through which users engage with these networks. We argue that these features are critical for social media participants. Based on our analysis of Tweetdeck and Brizzly, we develop a set of best practices that should guide the research and design of participant experiences in social media and the third-party applications that many of them often use.
design twitter usability heuristics social media social networking systems third party tools