Twitter is testing out an entirely new way for people to sign up, with an eye toward getting them to stick around. WIRED saw a new Twitter onboarding (or sign up) process last week that indicates the company is trying to overhaul its new-user experience. Among other things, Twitter is trying to steer new users toward the people and topics they're actually interested in. Even if this isn't live yet, it's about time.
Helping new users understand what to do once they sign up for an account has been a significant, long-term problem for Twitter. It has a clear issue to solve with attrition -many people log on and never come back again. People hear about Twitter-maybe via something like Ellen DeGeneres' Oscar selfie-then try to sign up, and are confronted by a fairly large 'what now' problem. Even if you're just using it as a reader, which apparently very many of its users do, you need to have relevant things to read. You want to see updates from your friends or at least people you know, as well as interesting pertinent information.
Part of the problem is that for years now the company has more or less guided people blindly towards popular accounts with little notion of their relevance. Maybe you hate pop music, or teens (as you should!). Well, sorry, Twitter is still going to suggest you follow Justin Bieber.
But WIRED has seen two very interesting new user signup modes recently. The first, on Android, just uses your Google account information to help populate your new Twitter account and contacts. But the other web-based mode, which we saw while creating a new account last week, was far more interesting.
After new users are asked to do the typical stuff (pick a username, enter your email address, and designate a password) Twitter now asks to connect to your Gmail.
Once you've given it access to your address book, it scans it and looks for contacts. It then spits back a list of suggestions for folks to follow. The one I was given was powerfully good. The first suggestion was my main twitter account, and with one or two exceptions, everyone else in the list of 20 people it spat back was highly relevant to my life.
These were almost all people with whom I communicate regularly (and have done so for a very long time), and who also tweet regularly. That last factor in particular seems important. If Twitter suggests you follow 20 people in your address book who do not actually tweet much, then you're going to have an uninspiring timeline.
Once you've finished selecting people to follow from your address book, it kicks you over to an interests section. That's important, because Twitter is more of an interest network than it is anything else. Twitter has kind of crudely waved at connecting you with interests before, but now it's really trying to get granular-instead of just 'sports' you have an option for 'NHL,' for example.
Dive in and you get a list of people (or brands) for every topic, as well as a preview of their latest tweet. These appear to be sorted by the most-recently updated, which at least gives a modicum of insurance that you're getting fresh content.
After you've followed a few accounts it then prompts you to go back to your profile where you're given a couple of suggestions for a first tweet, along with prompts to add a profile photo and background image.
What you end up with, or at least what I did, is a populated timeline full of relevant things to your interests and people you know. (You also don't have the Twitter new-user egg profile photo if you actually follow the prompts).
It's hard to overstate how much of an improvement this is. I have slightly more Twitter accounts than I do pairs of shoes (though fewer than the number of domains I own). I've signed up for them again and again, over many years, and its on-boarding process has long been, to be charitable, awful. (For example, during a previous attempt I made at signing up for an account, I was suspended for following Twitter's own process. After signing up for a new account via the Android app and importing my Gmail contacts, I followed Twitter's suggestion to follow those contacts-and then was promptly suspended for following too many accounts at once.)
Yet while this seems to be a dramatically improved process, it isn't necessarily the future of Twitter. The product has gone into a stage of hyper-experimentalism recently, and rolls out new user tests all the time, some of which never see the light of day again. When we asked, a Twitter spokesperson declined to comment and referred us to a blog post on its experiments.
But often these test cases do become the new normal. Many weeks before it rolled out its new profile designs, a version of it showed up for WIRED fellow Pranav Dixit (and then went away). And similarly, WIRED staffers had two separate experimental builds of Twitter's iOS app that later effectively merged into version 6 of its software.
Whether or not this particular process flow ends up being the default experience, it's clear the company is at least revamping onboarding. Moreover, the company is certainly aware that sign up has been a problem in the past. So whether it's this method, or another, what's clear is that change is coming.
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