Twitter - March 2023

Since Elon Musk has taken over, Twitter's staff has decreased dramatically. This headcount decline doesn't necessarily mean that Twitter as a product decreased in quality, but we see a number of signs that show product changes at Twitter are not entirely thoughtful.

As a social platform Twitter's always punched above its weight. Because of this Twitter has fantastic potential to increase monetization and capture larger business markets, but severe usability issues in content search and running new campaigns using the Twitter's ads platform prevent Twitter from competing more directly with other larger social media giants such as Facebook, Google, and TikTok.

Larger social media platforms retain size advantages over the comparatively niche twitter, but the world's most well known people still express their thoughts in ways that are arguably more consumable on Twitter than on any other social media platform where new social media posts get judged by their aesthetic quality.

What's Wrong with Twitter's Ads Platform

Difficulty onboarding new business users.

Lack of context in the new ad campaign setup progress.

Users expect to walk through a seamless list of steps creating, reviewing, and deploying their advertising compaigns. Instead of offering that, Twitter lets users progress past required campaign setup steps only to notify them that they must fix existing issues later.

Simple CSS issues that can easily be fixed also hurt the Twitter ad platform user experience. 

Visual placement of elements on screen sometimes prevent users from seeing important buttons and interactions. This is the case even on popular screen sizes, such as 1280 by 800 pixels (a popular resolution on Apple MacBook 13").

Image creative usability issues. 

Images, arguably the most important element of the advertising platform user experience should work in a variety of presentation formats and simply don't.