Twitter apps have been popular projects for app developers since the App Store's get-go, but Twitterrific found a perch at the top of this crowded category right from the start. Twitterrific captures the essential ease of Twitter itself—great for casual Twitter fans—but its clever filtering tools and a flock of carefully chosen features make it easy for power users to sift and act on vast volumes of tweets, too. The features that aren't included are nearly as important as those that are. Twitterrific emphasizes simplicity, eschewing the feature creep that complicate so many Twitter apps whether on the desktop or on the iPhone.
Twitterrific was created by the crew at The Iconfactory, led by principals Craig Hockenberry and Gedeon Maheux. The app began when Twitter itself was simple (post and read 140-character updates—that's it). By the time the team started work on Twitterrific 2.0, Twitter had developed a complex ecosystem of third-party services, cultural conventions, and intertwined conversations that went well beyond posting standalone tweets. To keep up with this headlong surge of changes, Twitterrific gained several carefully considered custom controls to access advanced features while keeping the main interface clean and simple. Craig and Gedeon explained the challenges of designing for Twitter's overwhelming feature set and shared the insights that led them to create controls for Twitterrific that could do things better than (not just different from) the standard controls.
Gedeon Maheux: Twitter is such a moving target. They keep adding things, and the environment changes so frequently that it's difficult to design for it. It's difficult to make the app future-proof, in other words—to make it simple but also give those additional features to people who need them without making them jump through hoops. The more things you support in a single application, the more complex the user interface has to get; things start getting out of hand. So you have to focus and choose your features carefully.
Craig Hockenberry: Simplicity is important in a mobile device. You're often using it in chaotic situations. You're on a bus, or you're late for an appointment, or you're in other situations where there are lots of stimuli around you. So, less is actually more in those situations. It's actually harder to make a simple interface on the iPhone than it is to make a complex interface. One of the problems with Twitter is that there's such a rich data set, and there are so many things you can do. You've got to leave stuff out. A lot of other Twitter clients try to do it all without staying focused on what you really need to do and how to keep it as simple as possible.
You get some power users who want every new feature immediately. They want the feature just because it exists, not because it provides some actual use to their lives on Twitter. For us, choosing a feature is always about the use case. Twitter always has new features coming down the pipeline, but we don't jump on them right away, because we don't know how people will use them yet. Our focus is always on figuring out, "Why would you want to use a feature? Why do you need geotagging in Twitter? What's the best way to use Twitter lists?" Until we figure it out, we don't put it in. We always start with "why," with the use case. Say somebody tweets, "Where's the best place to get a hamburger in San Francisco?" You want to know how people respond, so you want to see recent messages directed to that person. That's a common use case that other Twitter clients don't make very easy, and we decided to make that something simple to do. You just hit the asterisk button in the toolbar, hit the @author button, and there it is.
