One of the first things you’re likely to notice when running TweetAgora is that we use much larger avatar images than other Twitter clients (52% larger, to be exact). Rather than use the small-sized (48px x 48px) profile pictures that Twitter provides, we’ve elected to go with the bigger-sized (73px x 73px) images.
The reason we made this decision has to do with TweetAgora’s raison d’être: improving Twitter’s signal-to-noise ratio. While we’re doing our best to provide lots of ways to filter the tweet stream, there’s no better filter than your own eyeballs. By using nice big avatar images, it becomes much easier to see who’s tweeting when scanning through the entire stream. It’s based on how the brain processes visual images (Colin Ware’s ‘Visual Thinking in Design’).
A very common assumption is that using these larger avatars takes up too much space, and results in seeing less information. It’s an easy assumption to make, but if you’ll check out this picture of TweetAgora side-by-side with Twitter for iPhone, you’ll see that’s just not the case.
In this example, you can see that the difference is 1.5 lines of text – because @algore’s tweet was less than 60 characters. For any tweet over 60 (or so) characters, TweetAgora uses the exact same amount of space per tweet as Twitter for iPhone. Given that the average tweet length is around 92 characters (source), for the most part this difference is negligible. Besides, why should a short tweet get less visual distinction than a longer tweet? Brevity deserves prominence!
Comments?
The larger avatars and coloured names are a nice touch. I find the timeline easier to make sense of than other apps.
I just downloaded TweetAgora last night, so I don’t have too much experience with it. Lots of things I like, only few that I prefer on the Twitter app.
I find the reply, retweet, DM buttons in a tweet menu are a little too prominent. But that’s a personal view on the aesthetic. Love the gestures for quick reply/retweet.
Thanks for the feedback Rick!
We intentionally made the Reply/RT/DM buttons more prominent than the other (table) options, though perhaps too much so. We’ve got a new theme coming which should be a little easier on the eyes (might post a preview soon)
Very cool. I do like the placement and organization of the buttons relative to the table options below.
Thanks Mark for the Explanation … makes perfect sense now ..