I’ve been using TweetDeck for my tentative tiptoeing into Twitter.

Of course, as always, I immediately felt compelled to revamp the user interface, with my clean-up gun set to ‘Maximum’.

Here’s the before-and-after (click to enlarge):

The key changes:

• Cleaner display of tweets. Use a cleaner, anti-aliased font, replace the text-heavy date stamp with a current time offset, remove the posting client (note: not sure if that’s allowed!), and remove the divider line between tweets, relying on good alignment and grouping to separate tweets.
• Remove the column background: there’s no need for that extra shading.
• Reduce the visual intensity of some unimportant column parts, such as the Twitter logo and scroll bar, so the user can focus on the content.
• Remove the row of buttons at the bottom, allowing for more tweets to be displayed. In any case there are better ways to implement those features than using confusing, icon-only buttons, and I’ve made a first pass at showing an improvement. Want to move the column? You don’t need a button for that, just drag the column title across. How about searching? Well, let’s make that a permanent box at the top where people expect it. Marking tweets as seen? I’ll be honest here: I don’t understand this concept in TweetDeck and can’t figure out (a) how tweets look when ’seen’, and how to ‘un-see’ tweets. I’ll take an initial guess and say most people are just happy to clear a column once they’ve read the latest tweets, hence the ‘clear tweets’ button at the top. User testing would reveal more.

This mockup was surprisingly fun to do. My focus, as always, was to cleanly present what really matters: the tweets! Everything else, to a greater or lesser extent, is just ’stuff’.