Twitter Listens to Its Users: Kills the #DickBar

Twitter finally listens to its users and promises to remove the QuickBar from the next update of its iPhone app.

When Twitter launched the latest version of its official iPhone app, it added a new feature, the QuickBar, that displayed trending topic to the top of the user’s timeline. The problem with this feature was that just seeing the trending topics provides close to no value for most users, yet the QuickBar took up valuable screen estate. Many also felt that this was just a sneaky way to push “promoted trends” (Twitter’s version of ads) into a user’s timeline (as I said at the time, if a trend has to be promoted, it isn’t much of a trend). Thankfully, though, Twitter has finally listened to its users and today, the company announced that it will remove the so-called QuickBar from its app in the next update.

According to Twitter, the QuickBar – which its users quickly dubbed the DickBar in honor of Twitter CEO Dick Costolo – “was originally conceived to help users discover what’s happening in the broader world beyond people they already follow.” Interestingly, Twitter also notes that it wasn’t just meant to highlight trending topics, but that the company’s designers also though of it “as a potential means of in-app notifications for new @mentions, DMs, and other important activity.” I can’t remember that Twitter ever communicated this broader goal for the QuickBar before and I also can’t help but wonder if its users’ reaction would have been different if Twitter had explained this before.

Twitter Saw “Incredibly High Usage Metric for the QuickBar”

As for the success of the QuickBar, Twitter notes that it likes to test features and then removes them “if we learn it doesn’t improve the user experience or serve our mission” – yet at the same time, the company’s blog post also states that it saw “incredibly high usage metrics for the QuickBar.”