A key design element to any object whether physical or digital is signifiers. Signifiers tell people how to interact with the object, unleashing its capabilities.
Affordances define what actions are possible. Signifiers specify how people discover those possibilities: signifiers are signs, perceptible signals of what can be done. – Don Norman, The design of everyday things.
It is surprising, how a company like twitter suffering from an engagement problem partly because of the 140 characters limit, yet users started using the product in a different way to overcome this problem by posting tweetstorms.
Tweetstorm is a series of tweets about the same topic, posted sequentially and mostly marked by their order. – Unknown
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— Mostafa Nageeb (@MostafaNageeb) April 10, 2016
While twitter now supports tweetstorms by allowing users replying to themselves, there are no signifiers on the app nor the website that you can do this. I still see lots of tweetstorms where users post each tweet separately marked by a number instead of replying to the previous tweet to continue on the topic.
This problem leads to another problem which is making it harder for users to read the whole tweetstorm specially if it is from a user they are not following, because they can’t simply tap on the tweet and read the whole tweetstorm, instead they have to visit the person’s profile to read everything. Add to this if the tweetstorm is old and unlinked, it is very hard to reshare it whether on twitter or on any other platform as the users have to scroll back in the person’s profile until the time of the tweet to be able to read the storm.
Twitter, please fix this.