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Quoted Tweets (or Quoted Replies or Retweets with Comments) often have a user experience that is unfavourable to the users. This essay explores the issues and offers solutions to solving them.
There are 5 issues with quoted tweets as follows:
Have you ever followed a conversation via Retweet with comment on twitter? It almost feels like Russian Nesting Dolls as you uncover each response. You click on one tweet which is a quote tweet of another tweet which is a quote tweet of another tweet and so on.
The trick though is to recognise that the responses are in reverse chronological order as you go down through the tweet rabbit hole. This task often causes a cognitive load on the user navigating conversations as it’s the unnatural way to follow a conversation. These series of actions can be a painful experience for the user.
As you browse your timeline, If you come across a tweet that is a retweet with comment, you often have to “jump in” to view the original tweet (and the responses if inclined) then “jump out” to read the retweet with comment (and the responses if inclined). If the conversation is a russian nesting doll rabbit hole then this becomes an arduous task. Once you are all caught up on the conversations, the question then becomes why are there different conversation threads happening on the same topic? If a user wants to respond, which do they respond to? Do they respond directly under the original tweet or with a retweet with comment? There are so many questions one can unravel here that it makes it difficult for the user to decide which leads to a painful user experience.
When you come across a tweet with 100 replies and 100 quote tweets, you are being offered the choice of selecting which responses you want to see. You can either choose the direct replies which move downwards or the quoted tweets which move upwards. This leads to the question: Why are there two ways to view replies on a tweet? This is highly disjointed for the user.
This situation gets more complex if each quoted tweet also has 100 replies and 100 quoted tweets, leading to labrinth of disjointed russian nesting dolls. This experience can be very chaotic and undesirable for the user.
Upward responses: I believe Quoted Replies enable bullying as each quoted response is placed on top of the Original Poster’s (OP) tweet which can be visually thought of as “looking down” on the OP’s tweet. Users can often use language that is dismissive and unconstructive as visually, the hierarchy of their tweet sits on top of the OP’s tweet. This leads to an unpleasant response for all users and the cycle can repeat itself multiple times over.
Downward responses: Currently, if a direct reply to a tweet is not constructive to the conversation, the OP has the ability to hide replies but this is impossible on quoted replies which can lead to more abuse.
On twitter, there also seems to be two names for the same feature: Retweet with Comment and Quote Reply. This is highly confusing and disjointed for the user and adds to the ever increasing problems of this feature. Twitter will need to decide which naming convention is best across the platform.
Before we dive into the solutions, I think it’s important to look at the history of the feature to gain some context.
Twitter adopted this feature as a main feature as they saw this behaviour “hack” happening on other twitter clients. A user would often add their responses to a tweet in a quoted manner so that their responses would appear on their timeline and their followers timeline.
Tweets often looked like this:
Due to the 140 character limit, these responses were often difficult to read and the user who quoted the tweet did not often contribute much to it as there was hardly any character count left.
The reason why users opted for the quote tweets hack instead of direct replies was because quoted tweets appeared on their timeline for their followers to see and direct replies underneath a tweet did not, especially if the followers were not following both parties in the conversation.
Visibility and social currency is the reason why users often opted to respond via quote tweet
In my estimation, Twitter’s introduction of the thread feature (linking one tweet with another in a chain) solved the quote tweet issues above.
I believe if the issue/context was visibility, then the solution is, whenever a user wants to respond to a tweet, there should be two options available as a toggle:
If the user chooses Reply Only, then only followers of both accounts (or those that come across the tweet) would be able to see the conversation.
If a user chooses Reply and Retweet, then the followers of the users would be able to see the original tweet the user is responding to as well as the response.
This design solves various things:
Technically, this design can be implemented easily as it is already possible to do these things but only as separate actions. But tying these actions together brings about consistency and uniformity across the platform. It also reduces cognitive load and alleviates a painful user experience as things are followed in an expected fashion.
In UX Design, this is referred to as Jakob's Law:
"Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know."
The problem with my analysis is, quoted tweet is already a major feature on twitter which users use everyday. Removing this may cause an uproar and it would be chaotic initially for users. However, since quoted tweet is only unique to twitter and most other platforms follow the downward reply rule, the uproar would be short-lived as twitter is now embracing what users are used to on other platforms not going against it.