A friend of mine signed up for Twitter, and couldn&#x27;t figure out to use it. She asked me for help. This is a highly educated, intelligent, smart person.<p>I was scanning &#x27;scopes on periscope.tv on my laptop PC, and I really liked this one guy&#x27;s scope. It took me a long time to figure out what his Periscope handle was (I had to simultaneously open the Periscope app on my phone, search this guy&#x27;s name, and then click on each of the two people with the same name to figure out which one he was).<p>A couple of days ago, needing a laugh, I took the plunge and downloaded Vine on my phone. To start off, I wanted to see the most popular Vines ever (or in the comedy section). I was sure that would make me laugh. There was apparently no way to watch the top Vines ever, or even in any category. This is obviously a popular need, seeing that YouTube is flooded with compilations of popular Vines. (In fact, instead of losing all their traffic to YouTube, they should consider having a feature that seamlessly stitches Vines together to play them continuously without having to scroll anything.)<p>Twitter&#x27;s complexity to new users is well known. I suspect this complexity is spreading like contagion to its other amazing products.<p>What&#x27;s the solution here? Completely replace the product dev. teams with fresh eyes? Bring in end-users to test product? Bring in a Steve Jobs-like &quot;editor&quot; to &quot;simplify, simplify&quot;?<p>They have 2 clients for the same service (twitter). While that is probably a good thing in certain situations... as of now it seems like unnecessary overlap and a waste of resources.<p>As a heavy consumer of Twitter, and someone who is very intrigued by Periscope and Vine, it has me very concerned that even after identifying a key issue (end-user complexity), they seem to be unable to find a quick-fix.
Complexity Contagion – Twitter / Periscope / Vine