Elon Musk to Gadgets 360: "Several Major UI Updates Coming in Jan"

A late-night Twitter exchange led to an interesting teaser of what's to come.

Written by Jamshed Avari | Updated: 24 December 2022 03:54 IST

Photo Credit: Bloomberg

Highlights

There's no indication of the type and extent of planned UI changes yet
Musk seemingly agrees that screen space isn't used optimally now
Twitter recently began showing engagement stats on all tweets

Elon Musk has recently taken to responding to some Twitter users who tag him, and has been known to jump into conversations on the platform that he now owns. In a recent conversation about improving the Twitter UI, Musk replied to a Gadgets 360 staff member's suggestion and also stated "several major UI improvements" are coming in January. As current CEO of Twitter, Musk has made sweeping changes to the service and has also introduced tiny tweaks, some of which seem to be experiments. Most recently, Twitter began displaying views and interaction statistics for each tweet in order to demonstrate that while not a lot of people actively comment or like tweets, they are being read.

On Friday afternoon, Musk ran a Twitter poll asking users whether view counts should be shown on the left or right of the tweet UI. The new statistic is currently displayed on the left, taking precedent over the Reply, Retweet and Like indicators. At the end of the polling period, 54.3 percent of users had voted to move it to the right, while 45.7 percent seemed to be happy with the current spot. The poll spawned several discussion threads about other UI tweaks that Twitter might want to consider.

That and several major UI improvements coming in Jan
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 23, 2022

Gadgets 360 staffer Pranav Hegde replied to Musk pointing out the space wasted by text labels for Views, Likes, Retweets and Quote Tweets below each tweet on the service's mobile UI and suggesting that using icons instead might allow all of them to fit on one line.

Musk replied in the affirmative, indicating that Twitter has either already thought of that, or will implement this change following his suggestion. Other users chiming in on the thread made additional suggestions regarding the use of screen space, while others pointed out UI bugs and others made jokes about Musk's habit of running polls and making impulsive changes.

Tweet impression count should
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 23, 2022

The soon-to-be-ex CEO, who has promised to step down after finding a suitable successor, has made plenty of changes to Twitter's functionality since taking over, including a complete reimagining of blue identity verification tickmarks and an overhauled Twitter Blue subscription plan. He has announced that he intends to allow all users to edit tweets, and is working on raising the 280 character limit to 4,000, which would fundamentally change the way Twitter is used.

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