There were a few different responses to yesterday's news of Twitter redesigning its user profile pages. Some people liked it. Some people hated it. Many rightly pointed out that it looked a lot like Facebook. But many others shared the sentiment of my colleague Mat Honan, who Tweeted, "Sure, I like my new profile page, but when do you ever look at someone's Twitter profile?"

It's true that for people like me and you, Twitter is defined by the firehose-like barrage of Tweets known as the timeline. That, for better or worse, is the Twitter we've come to expect. But there are a huge number of people who know nothing of the timeline. They've heard of Twitter, maybe, but they've never bothered to sign up. These people wind up on Twitter when they search Google for Lady Gaga and follow the third or fourth search result to twitter.com/ladygaga. They don't care about the firehose. They just want to see Gaga's trickle of updates. Twitter's freshly redesigned profile pages are for these people.

>The redesign isn't just about making Twitter friendlier for casual users.

Over the course of the next few weeks, all Twitter users will get moved to the new profile page. Visually, the biggest change is the introduction of a full-width header image, a la Facebook's cover photo. Gone are quirkily charming tiled backgrounds of the old profile page.

Tweets appear a bit differently too. Users can opt to put a "pinned tweet" at the top of their column, plucking one from the chronological stack as a sort of 140-character slogan. In the list of tweets itself, popular tweets will appear in slightly larger text, making them easier to find in a quick scan. Each tweet is also wrapped in its own little container, making the stream feel less like an endless, mashed-together slog and more like a collection of distinct bon mots.

Shifting the Boat

On one level, the redesign was just about giving the profile a fresh coat of paint. "When you look at the old profile, it's basically a glorified stream with a header on top," says Dave Bellona, the Twitter designer who led the project. Functionally, that's not especially inviting to newcomers. A strictly chronological profile has a decent chance of being topped with a bunch of at-replies–fragments of conversations, essentially–that probably won't mean much to someone unfamiliar with the service. The question with the redesign, Bellona says, was, "How do we slowly shift the boat to be able to make Twitter a little bit more understandable to the rest of us?"

On the new profile page, each Tweet gets its own container, making for a slightly less intimidating stream. Image: Twitter

That's the core existential challenge Twitter faces today. In the last year, we've seen the company taking steps to lessen the full force of the firehose, ostensibly in hopes of making the service friendlier to casual users. These include breaking up the dense flow of text with in-line images and loosening chronology by threading conversations in the timeline. Still, deviating too far from this core experience would be disastrous–something Twitter well knows.

But profile page, as my colleague Mat pointed out, isn't part of that core experience to begin with. In that view, the redesign isn't just about making Twitter friendlier for casual users. It's also an acknowledgement that some people may never make it to the timeline in the first place. It's a concession to another type of user–and another type of user behavior.

If you're one of these people, Bellona says, "The frequency at which you check in on the people that you find interesting isn't going to be everyday. It's going to be closer to once a week or once every two weeks." In the case of many of these users, perhaps, the profile page of a favorite celebrity is as far as they want or need to go.

Dave Bellona Photo: Twitter

Bellona and his fellow designers at Twitter considered some even more radical approaches to the profile page throughout the year-long design process. One included a tiled layout, where content was freed from the stream entirely. Ultimately, the familiar column of Tweets prevailed.

Packaging Things Up

Still, the redesign puts an emphasis on packaging that was totally absent before. The expansive top photo, the user-defined pinned tweet, and the algorithmically-resized Tweets in the feed all serve the purpose of creating a more approachable package for the one-stop user. "We asked, 'how can we make this more like a magazine cover–almost like a summary of its contents,'" Bellona says. If Twitter hitherto has been about aggregating a digest from all sorts of sources, the new profile offers a polished entry point for those who just want to catch up with a single subject.

Other small touches emphasize the profile's new status as a useful place to park yourself. The new design pings Twitter's servers for updates every 30 seconds and automatically threads new Tweets into the stream, instead of forcing users to click a notification to reveal new tweets. The team conceived of it as a sort of "ticker tape" effect, especially useful in the case of someone live-tweeting an event.

Twitter will undoubtedly continue trying to push their newsfeed into more mainstream territory. The new profile design, though, is a slightly different play. It does make Twitter easier for newcomers to understand, offering a shinier, more product-like public face to people who arrive directly at a user page.

But it also positions the Twitter profile as a destination unto itself, apart from the newsfeed entirely. It's a concession to an entirely different use case than the one Twitter was built upon. "For some people, it's all about that real-time newsfeed," Bellona says. "For some, it's just like, 'I want to see what a celebrity is up to.' Both should be really great. And that's where we took a big step forward."