Process is so important that i'm going to dedicate this post to some of the examples of great processes GONE WRONG!

My victim is the beloved TWITTER, yes you read it right, TWITTER is a prime example of a great process gone wrong. As i mentioned earlier, to have great success we must take things step by step. Every little thing is made up of small details that working together make up the substance of that object. Now i'm not bashing Twitter here, in fact the opposite, twitter has a lot that we can learn from it. in the last post i mention that in order to fix something it's always easier to split the project into different key proccesses and analyse each process to figure out the root of the problem. here is what happened to me when i signed up for twitter, and what can be done to fix it!

I started my account on twitter on March 20th and it was a horrible experience at first. in fact i almost gave up. Now at that time i was starting a blog that would be dealing with user experience, branding and strategy. so it was kind of shameful that i couldn't figure out some simple stuff in probably the web's simplest site, according to many other geek sites. i was feeling dumbed down because i couldn't figure out how i can find interesting people on this site, i put in my email to add my friends, guess what!! none of my friends had an account on twitter, i had no connection and didn't know i could start one!!

Before i was about to tell my self "F*&# twitter, lets move on to something else" i decided to click on every button to see what they do, i clicked on 'Home' i saw another version of my own home page, which was very odd, clicked on 'find & follow' didn't know any names, so much for that promise, frustrated and about to give up, at last try i thought why don't i go to my Google RSS reader, go to some of the blogs that talk about twitter and use their names to add. Scoble from Scobalizer was the first dude i checked out, and walla after 2 hours i had my first friend. but as i added my friend #1 i discovered 'public timeline' which made life a lot easier, i had no idea what public timeline meant so i never clicked on it, i simply thought it had something to do with my account info since setting and help were right beside in the same font and color just like all the other menus!!

Where i think twitter failed for at the beginning was the fact that i signed up but after that i was kind of clueless, i learned a great example from one of my teachers, he said "always assume the people you're designing/building for are dumbest people on earth"

My solution is even better than the problem i ran into. it doesn't change the layout of the site, doesn't event change the styling all that much. to program it would probably take 30 seconds. My solution is visually shown on the image above. the change is not drastic nor is it layout altering. the new top menu is better organized and at the same time categorized. related menu items are kept together while the other ones are separated into another block.

Here is where TWITTER fails in the beginning, some times less is more is so little that we, the users, feel dumb for not finding them. People love twitter because it doesn't allow you to do many things, which is ironic since every single software, innovation, industrial, chemical and political company in the world wants to add more, do more, be more!

i think as a society we have become to used to the idea that everything must be so complex and that technology is complex by nature that when once in while we come across a really simple piece of software, for the life of us we can't figure out how to use it! isn't that funny!!
I admit i use Twitter for practice rather that anything else. i use to so i can get my points across in 140 characters or less with the same efficiency if i was writing a 1000 word essay.