Mark Forscher

If you’re one of the few people who view tweets on twitter.com itself (not on a mobile device or 3rd party app) and you have an eye for detail, you may have noticed a small usability improvement that was recently rolled out on the site.

When you’re logged in, on Twitter’s home screen a dashed line separates tweets (this is not new):

But now, when you click the “more” button to load twenty more tweets, a solid grey line divides the tweets you already read from the ones you haven’t:

The addition of the solid grey line above the unread tweets is a little tweak to the interface, but it is a definite improvement because it makes it easier for the user to stay oriented while scrolling down the page.

Another solution could have been to only load as many tweets as are visible vertically within one screen. In this scenario, each click of the more button would load “x” more tweets and automatically scroll to the first unread tweet. The user could keep clicking the more button at the bottom of the browser window, making it easier than the 2-step process of clicking the more button and then scrolling.

But this approach would require more clicks from the user, and possibly more database calls to load tweets depending on how the site is architected. (Anyone who knows how Twitter.com is architected please feel free to step in here.) And of course, the vertical area that is visible within a browser varies greatly which would present a programmatic challenge.

All and all, I think this is a good example of a little tweak that makes a difference in the ease of use of a digital product—the difference between a dashed and a solid line is not all aesthetics.