Twitter just overhauled the look and feel of its Android app from what felt like a clunky afterthought into something slick and lovely. Here is a before-and-after comparison of the design.
You can tell immediately that the new design is cleaner and easier to read — but don’t let that fool you. There’s actually more information. That’s quite an accomplishment. How did they do it?
The performance of the app is way faster now. Part of that is general improvement in speed, but it’s also the long overdue addition of swipe gestures from one page to another.
For starters, Twitter eliminated the the labels on the icons. We don’t need those those, we understand what the images for each of those icons mean, so you don’t need the clutter they create.
Here’s what it looked like before the redesign: