Twitter announces changes to improve users’ experiences

Sometimes small changes can make a big impact. That’s what Twitter is hoping with a slew of small changes to its user experience announced on its blog Wednesday.

“We’ve been working to change how you discover all the information around news, events, and stories, and today, we’re sharing a few steps forward,” Keith Coleman, Twitter’s vice president of product, said in the blog post. “It’ll be easier to find and follow the big events and stories you care about in your timeline, Notifications and Explore. Also, there’s a new look and feel for Moments showing everything you’d want to see.”

Twitter said it was responding to user feedback with the changes it’s making to Explore, Search, Notifications and Moments. Most will be rolled out in the coming weeks and months.

Explore

Twitter’s Explore feature will be organized by topic instead of content type.

Search

Starting today, users will see related news, events or stories at the top of their search results. They can dive deeper and find out more information and the latest discussion by tapping on those results.

Notifications

Twitter is expanding its “Happening now” feature, which allows sports fans to follow along with tweets about a game and get the score in one place. This feature will include tweets about breaking and personalized news surfaced to the top of a user’s timeline.

Twitter also plans to add to its breaking news notifications with alerts based on interests gleaned from your activity on Twitter.

Moments

Finally, users will navigate through Moments using a vertical swipe, versus the current horizontal swipe. The company is also adding additional timelines to Moments, including, it said, “a recap timeline showing Tweets you may have missed, another showing the latest, as well as top commentary when it’s available. If there’s a live video, you’ll see it there, too. You may have already noticed these changes for some sports games, but now you’ll start to see them for more news and events as well.”