Yesterday I saw a few mentions of Twitter’s new method for “crowd-sourcing” user blocks. The idea is that one person may have blocked dozens of trolls, and you want to do the same without having to dig through a lot of Tweets. I read about how it was implemented, sighed, and moved on. Last night, someone I respect for his technical prowess over the years said it was “well done”, and I disagreed. He said I should post a blog with my idea, so your wish is granted.
The Twitter blog that outlines the implementation says some users “need more sophisticated tools.” Sophisticated, not convoluted and annoying to implement. There is a big difference. From the blog:
To export or import a list of blocked accounts, navigate to your blocked accounts settings on twitter.com. Click on the advanced options drop-down menu and select the action you want to take.
To download a list of your blocked accounts, select the export option and confirm the accounts you want to export.
The blog doesn’t even explain the next part for some reason, and I am curious why. Could it because the process starts looking more hassle than benefit? The next step is to host that block list somewhere, advertise you did so, have another user download it, then they go to twitter.com, and imports the list. Fast and easy right? Of course not; that is one of the most convoluted methods of using this type of feature. Your average Twitter user, especially the huge percent that only use it via mobile, simply will not go through this process (and cannot easily do it if they wanted to). Even sitting at my computer, having to do actions outside my Twitter client is annoying and this has too many steps.
How about integrate the functionality instead? Every client has a way to look up a user, or interact with them.
Just about anywhere on this context menu works nicely. “Add/Inherit @AlecMuffet’s blocks…” or “Block @AlecMuffet’s blocks…” or “Share @AlecMuffet’s blocks…”. One click and a confirmation box, and I could take any of his exported blocks and make them my own. That presents a smoother, more easily crowd-sourced model that is the intent here. If I have multiple accounts, it is three clicks as I choose which account (or all accounts) to add blocks to. Compare that 2 or 3-click method, with the one Twitter came up with. Designing the “User Experience” (UX) is an art, and not many companies do it well. It is often due to the disconnect between how the developers use a product or service and how their users or customers use it.