Twitter Playback — UX

Siyam Adit
3 min readMar 12, 2023

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No matter how renowned the app is. As a UX Designer, my job is to find the faults in a product and improve it. So it provides a better experience for users. For this case study, I chose Twitter.

image of twitter
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

We all love Twitter; almost everyone uses it. I have been using it for a long time. After Elon Musk buys it, we are seeing significant improvement in Twitter. Sometimes they are trash too.

a meme for UX designers
meme for the culture

The Problem

On a usual day, I was scrolling through Twitter. I found a video which is 10 minutes long. I am not a person to watch a video at 1x speed. I usually watch it with a minimum playback speed of 1.5x. I was searching for an option which increases playback speed. But I found this,

Twitter playback UI settings

The Setting

Well, I couldn’t find that 10 min video. But here is another screenshot. I find it a bit unusual. So, from YouTube, what I know is. If I touch the setting option. It should direct me to the video settings like adjusting video quality, adjusting playback speed, and other features.

But instead, it showed me adjusting the playback speed.

The radio button

Also, the playback speed adjusting option is designed with radio buttons, and the touch area eventually becomes smaller. These affected the user experience.

twitter playback speed radio buttons

So, there are 2 problems,

I, as a user, found it difficult to find the playback speed option.

After finding it out, it was tough for me to choose the desired playback option due to the small touch-surface area.

Let’s get into the solution.

The Solution

According to Jakob’s Law, Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

When people touch the settings option, they expect it to show some options related to video playback, like YouTube.

So, there must be a clear representation of an icon showing that this video is playing at ‘this’ speed. If you touch it, you can change the playback speeds.

Also, increasing the touch area of the radio buttons for choosing the playback speed is not a good option. Instead, I can design a UI which will be a suitable solution, solving the touch area problem.

Here is the improved UI,

image representing the playback speed of the video
image showing the playback speed of the video

Instead of showing the settings options, this design clearly indicates the button for playback speed. Also, it indicates the playback speed at which the video is running.

The touch surface area has increased

Instead of that small radio buttons, I have designed controls that have a good touch surface.

A gif representing the UI

gif showing the improved UI with animations involved
UI with animations

This gif shows the improved UI with animations involved. Notice the playback speed option changes when I switch between the speed. Well, that's the solution. Thanks for your time.

Thanks!

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Siyam Adit

I'm a self taught Product Designer passionate about solving problems in digital products, and create a good User Experience with my solutions.