Dear Twitter, Stop Redesigning your Website
Published: 2020-03-21 16:00:26

So I started my day off with Twitter and saw this. ![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/325bwtdtmyyl52as2uzu.png)
To some, they might not see it, but I very much did. What did I see? I saw my little icon peaking out underneath the sidebar UI. ![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/2dbeovbe9x2rwmwk68l6.png)
Twitter, STOP!! To say I hated the Twitter UI when it changed from the old one is a bit of an understatement. Kind of like saying Chernobyl is *a bit radioactive.* I am a web design nut, and I like it when designs are intuitive and sane. This does not qualify as intuitive or sane. Now I am only being this harsh because Twitter did it right THE FIRST TIME, and I understand that websites right now need to build up a modern look, but I want you to spend a minute and think, which two other social media platforms are also updating their website? YouTube and Facebook, both are getting wonderful designs. Ignoring YouTube Studio where that mess is a different mess (not UI focused mess). ![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/8oz9qav9mgpg043n1ner.png)
This is my homepage, it looks good, doesn't it? A simple UI that keeps fairly close to the original while looking good. Also, there is a cool feature that although I don't use on the home screen myself, it is a great idea to have and Twitter might be able to learn from it. ![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/lm6ojuesjumslv2st2ff.png)
Such a simple idea you might not even know what has changed. Well, I will tell you, the sidebar had retracted into a smaller thinner area, taking up less real-estate on the page. What about the new Facebook design? While still in the works, we can see how it looks already. These images are from 
Facebook themselves.
![Alt Text](https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v3/yX/r/wo2tTTdRtwG.png)

It seems to have the issue I have complained about and will complain about further. Except there is a caveat for Twitter's hope for me to be just as angry at Facebook. ![](https://static.xx.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v3/yZ/r/9aLQtYxGt9S.png)

Yes, it has an option for a hidden sidebar. As far as I can tell this is concept art but I am on the waitlist to see how it fully works and functions. Twitter has NO hidden sidebar. The content you WANT to see is taking up LESS SPACE than the navigational sidebar, and the trending sidebar. 

Below is an image I made in GIMP, measuring how much non-content real-estate is there, the grey of hex 888888 is where the content is. White is the page navigation, and black is trending and the search bar. ![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/0omqc21genq0imphafs0.png)

Now, let's move it and see how it looks if it was labeled by size, left to right, smallest to largest. ![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/8asma09edkzcjk6ensa2.png)

Now for those math lovers out there like me, that is a 1354 sized image (the size of the screenshot I took) at width. The width where if we cut the image at the mark where the black and white section meets the grey section which represents the content is 756. The number that we got dividing those two to see how large the black in white content was compared to grey is 1.79. That means the content taken by the whole section is bigger than the actual content. Don't worry, I also moved the grey on my image over the black and white area and halved the opacity to see if this was as true as the numbers say. They were. ![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/zkqeab4hiihhwtkq8g2z.png)

Now I am not including the horrible thing known as Modern-Padding Disease, which is an issue here on Twitter as removing the padding could make both the sidebars and the content in the middle roughly the same. However, I will forgive them for that as almost every website right now has the issue. However, the sheer size that cannot be modified is why I am angry. I actually might take the time to redesign it but right now I think I drilled in my point enough.