Twitter has made quite dramatic changes to its user experience this year and today they have made another one by replacing the classic star button for favourites with a heart button.
The new heart button is apparently called “likes” and the company says that it was aimed for new users due to the fact that they find the star button “confusing”. Twitter also claims that it was to make the experience using the social network “easier and more rewarding to use” since as they say, you may “like a lot of things but not everything can be your favourite”. Very confusing indeed for an experienced user like me or many out there.
However, Twitter makes a good point by highlighting the fact that the heart button is a symbol that describes a variety of emotions and easily connects with people so in a way it can resonate with a lot of people. One of their apps already uses hearts (Periscope) and it seemed fit to update Twitter and Vine too so as to have a seamless experience.
The company has had a problem of acquiring new users to the platform due to the fact that they find the platform really hard to understand. This seemingly subtle change of adding the heart button will resonate well with users from platforms like Instagram, who are currently more than Twitter’s 320 million monthly active users. For more experienced users however, this will bring the question of how we view posts. Currently, I view a retweet as either nodding to something that I like, relate to or find ridiculous. Favouriting on the other hand is used for later reading. Scrapping “favourites” with “likes” will change the way I use Twitter but from the company’s eyes, it is all in an effort to acquire new users. In the case for Vine
The updates have been rolled out on the mobile apps (Twitter for iOS and Android), twitter.com, Tweetdeck and The Twitter app for Windows 10 although you’ll see these changes later on Twitter for Mac. In the case for Vine, it is only available on the Android app and will be updated later for the iOS app.
Do you like the new changes?
