yooo I just launched my first product at Twitter, and wow what a fun journey it's been.

this is our first experiment of many to learn more about how people on Twitter might use audio to share their voice... https://twitter.com/twitter/status/1273306563994845185

so why bring audio to Twitter? the team talked at length about the amazing storytellers on Twitter. for ex:

Activists
Journalists
Podcasters
Radio Hosts
Musicians
Comedians

& everyday folks who just have a crazy story they need to get off their chest.

currently, y'all either tell stories through a single tweet or maybe a thread. what if you could use audio?

audio is packed with potential. we're curious how people on Twitter might leverage it. actually we have a TON of questions about audio & Twitter, like...

how long should an audio Tweet be?
how can we make listening to something on Twitter easy & useful?

questions like those helped inform design decisions like...

enabling long recordings--we predict the content from audio longer than 30s will be most interesting on the timeline.

including a dock experience--you can listen while scrolling Twitter or doing other stuff on your phone. audio requires attention, but shouldn't feel heavy.

recording audio is a bit intimidating. so we explored a bunch of ways to try to make it easy, like recording with friends!

but we landed on a design optimized for on-the-fly recording. you don't want to fumble around with UI if you're capturing thoughts at an active protest.

we also had a ton of fun thinking about all the ways we could visualize audio.

as always, in an effort to learn quickly while maintaining the integrity of our big vision, we had to make some tough design calls.

for ex, we stripped down editing features in favor of releasing them after we learn more about people's recording needs on Twitter.

now is a great time to shoutout my Research (Alexandra) Design ( @jakhorner), PM ( @akkhosh), and Eng ( @rmbrgn) partners. what stood out about our amazing collaboration:

good ideas came from all of us
design, code, & research plans weren't precious, sometimes you gotta rebuild

I can’t wait to listen to the crazy, informative, funny, weird, goofy stories y’all tell.

p.s.
who you think is going to drop the first voice Tweet mixtape