Twitter launched a fairly significant redesign to its interface and hopes to catch more users and keep them longer. The company looks to broaden its appeal by simplifying its process for new users while providing a more robust platform. The new design puts ease of use front and center, an effort to bridge the gap between power users and inexperienced “newbies.” The interface change moved rhe tweet stream over to the right bar and slide the “profile and trend bar” to the far left.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qqDy5BmYKE&w=560&h=315]

Twitter should be usable for people who know the shortcuts and also equally usable for those who don’t,” said Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter’s three co-founders and current chairman. “It’s not just a visual redesign but a conceptual redesign to make Twitter more accessible to the next billion users,” said Satya Patel, a Twitter senior executive, at an event inside the company’s future headquarters in an Art Deco building in a blighted, San Francisco neighborhood.

The revamped home page is now topped with three icons: Home, “@Connect,” and “#Discover.” Twitter seeks to rebrand the two most commonly used site functions — the at sign (@) and the hashtag (#) — making big strides in reducing the learning curve.
On the Home page, the overall feed is much more user-friendly and Facebook-like than before. Photos and videos show up within tweets and all information is presented in an easy-to-understand format. The other major development are brand pages to create “an even more compelling destination on Twitter for their brands,” as it sets its sights on long term monetization of the service. The redesign also makes several changes to the new user experience in order to make discoverability process easier for the new guys.

The new twitter interface

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/12/09/what-need-to-know-about-new-twitter/?test=faces#ixzz1gNpMq8WI