Twitter background image

Update! Mission successful! 

We all love twitter. As self-confessed twitter-addicts we seem to be spending more and more time with twitter every day. We’ve always been fans of apps to view and post to twitter,but since the brilliant redesign we have found ourselves predominantly using the web interface for desktop interaction.

Tweetbot is still our preferred mobile client. There are however some hangovers from the previous design that with very little effort could improve the experience for all.

twitter please make your background center-aligned

As designers one of the most important of these is how your twitter page looks. Many twitter users utilise the custom twitter background image to help differentiate both their profile and browsing experience on twitter.Brands and creative individuals use it to great effect, expressing more of their personality with it.

Twitter background examples

The current situation is not ideal as this background image is fixed top-left while the rest of the site is centrally aligned; the position of the background image is not horizontally-locked to the rest of the page content. A different visual alignment is displayed depending on each viewer’s browser window width. You’ll see what I mean if you look at our twitter profile page and try scaling your browser window.

Everyone would have a better experience if twitter modified the background image (likely a single line of code in the CSS) to be centrally aligned. Twitter profiles could have more possibilities for individual expression, using the space either side for those with large enough resolutions to receive the benefit (over 80% global majority now).

We have (very roughly) mocked up a quick demo of this to compare to the live twitter page:

View our demo

 

Please twitter, we would love to see this small change implemented.

 

Update

Success! Whether due to us and others complaining or just common sense iteration, twitter has now officially added this feature! Thanks to all who posted their tweets on this matter. We are all now much happier designers & twitter users! Now lets get creative, and also start using those lovely new twitter profile cover images.

Want to style your twitter page? You might find our twitter GUI PSD downloads useful.

 
• Design Review • August 4th 2012

You might also be interested in...

  • 1 million design resource downloads1 million design resource downloads We’re super excited to announce we recently passed the 1,000,000 download mark on our design resources. We made our first twitter resource back in 2013 as an internal tool to mock-up social profiles for clients. Photoshop had only […]
  • Live streaming on TwitterLive streaming on Twitter Twitter has be trying to make an impression in the video arena for some time. Twitter cards for video services allowed viewing of videos without leaving the timeline, as well as launching Vine (which seems to have dipped in popularity and […]
  • Tweetbot iOS app reviewTweetbot iOS app review Update - this is a review for tweetbot 2.0 released in Feb 2012, not the new iOS7 3.0. If thats what you're after here is a perfectly good review. Our thoughts are that the new tweetbot is awesome and you should all download it […]

Product Design

The ‘Product’ is the website, service, application, interactive thing being worked on by the business. The practice of Product Design is similar in a lot of ways to UX Design. It involves the coming together of many specific design disciplines...

Call to action (CTA)

A call to action is a marketing term that refers to a prompt that invokes a response leading to a sale. When referring to a call to action (CTA) in the digital design world we usually mean the interactive element that leads to the next step in the experience - something that needs to be clicked or tapped.

User testing

User testing refers to a technique used in the design process to evaluate a product, feature or prototype with real users. There are several reasons why you might want to undergo usability testing, the most common is that it allows the design team to identify friction in a user experience they are designing, so that it can be addressed before being built or deployed.

WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG (pronounced WIZ-ee-wig) is an acronym for "What You See Is What You Get". It helps identify an an interface that allows user input resulting in an output that is rendered in a similar way. For example; a word processor application interface might resemble a piece of paper,so when printed the user can see how the output will appear.

Content Management System

A content management system (CMS) is an tool that allows a website editor/administrator to manage the content that is displayed. Websites are made of HTML and CSS to create pages. Pages can be hard-coded but would require technical development skills to make changes. A CMS usually allows a person without coding knowledge to amend existing and add new content to a website using a WYSIWYG interface.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design refers to a web page that dynamically adapts its layout to fit the size and orientation of the device on which it is viewed. A responsive design allows for a more optimised user experience across desktop and laptop computers as well as smartphones and tablets of varying sizes.

User Stories

User stories allow the functionality of a product or service to be expressed as written descriptions of an experience as seen from the users perspective. The writing of user stories creates a list of design and development tasks to complete in order to create any required functionality.

User Interface

A user interface (UI) is a conduit between human and computer interaction - the space where a user will interact with a computer or machine to complete tasks. The purpose of a UI is to enable a user to effectively control a computer or machine they are interacting with, and for feedback to be received in order to communicate effective completion of tasks.

Personas

A persona in UX Design is the characterisation of a user who represents a segment of your target audience. On a project you might create any number of personas to be representative of a range of user needs and desires. The solutions you design must answer these needs in order to deliver value to your target audience.

Card sorting

A great, reliable, inexpensive method for discovering patterns in how users would expect to find content or functionality. Card sorting is used to test the taxonomy of data with a group of subjects, usually to help inform the creation of the information architecture, user flow, or menu structure on a project.

Brainstorming

A technique used to generate ideas around a specific topic. Often done in groups, but can be done individuals. The process usually involves writing down all ideas around a topic onto paper, a whiteboard or stickies often implying some kind of association.

Minimum Viable Product

An MVP is a product that has the minimum set of features to prove the most essential hypothesis for a product. Businesses building a new product can create a Minimum Viable Product to prove that an idea is viable and warrants further investment. A further benefit being that the next stage of development can be informed by feedback obtained from testing that MVP.

Sitemap

A sitemap is a diagrammatic representation of a hierarchical system. It usually depicts the parent-sibling relationship between pages in a website, showing how sub pages might be arranged underneath their parent groupings. This arrangement forms a map of the site.

User journey

A user journey represents a sequence of events or experiences a user might encounter while using a product or service. A user journey can be mapped or designed to show the steps and choices presented as interactions, and the resulting actions.

Prototype

A prototype is draft representation built to test ideas for layout, behaviour and flow in a system. Prototypes are an indispensable tool for resolving a large number of potential issues in a concept or business before too many resources are deployed to put a design into production.

Wireframes

A Wireframe is a visual schematic that conveys a basic level of communication, structure and behaviour during the design of a system. Wireframes are low-fidelity designs that bypass including a detailed user interface or visual design, conveying just enough to get across the core idea.

Usability

To say something is usable is a qualitative statement about how easy that thing is to use. Usability is an assessment of how learnable a system is and how easy a user finds it to use. The usability of a system or product is a key factor in determining whether the user experience is a good one.

Information Architecture

Information architecture is the design and organisation of content, pages and data into a structure that aids users understanding of a system. A more organised system enables users to more easily find the information they require and complete the intended tasks.

UI Design

User Interface Design is the discipline of designing software interfaces for devices, ideally with a focus on maximising efficiency, responsiveness and aesthetics to foster a good user experience.

UX Design

The practice of User Experience (UX) Design is the coming together of many specific design related disciplines to improve the usability, responsiveness, uptake and aesthetics of a product or service.

User Experience

A general term that covers all aspects of a user's participation while engaging with something that has been designed. Usually when talking about User Experience in the digital design field it refers to the interactions, reactions, emotions and perceptions while using an app, service, website or product.