So it's Cyber Monday, which means I've had eleven tabs open all morning that are technically "for research" and are actually just me refreshing a $40 off $80 code on Newegg that may or may not still work by the time I add the thing to my cart. Adobe's been putting out numbers all day claiming this is the biggest online shopping day in US history, something north of three billion dollars spent, and I believe it, because half of Twitter is either complaining a site crashed or bragging about a deal they got on a 4K TV they don't need yet. That's not really what I want to write about though. I want to complain about hearts.
Twitter switched from the star to the heart back on November 3rd, almost four weeks ago now, and I am still messing it up constantly. Not "messing it up" in some abstract UX-critic way, I mean my thumb still taps the wrong pixel and I end up liking something I only meant to bookmark for later, or worse, un-liking something I actually did mean to like because I panicked and tapped twice. The star used to feel like a little private filing cabinet. Favorite a tweet, come back to it in three days when you actually have time to read the article someone linked, nobody the wiser. Now it's a heart, it shows up in a "so-and-so liked your tweet" notification, and it reads as a public statement of approval whether I meant it that way or not.
I get why they did it. Hearts test better than stars, apparently. Twitter's own blog post about the change said the heart is universal, it works across languages and doesn't need explaining the way "favorite" sort of does (what does favoriting someone's tweet about their dog dying even mean, is it your favorite tragedy?). Fine. I'm sure the data says more people tap it. But there's a difference between a button that gets tapped more and a button that gets tapped more on purpose, and I don't think anyone measured that.
The part that actually bugs me, three and a half weeks in, is that I keep favorite-ing things out of habit that I would never have hit "like" on if I'd stopped to think about it for one extra second. A coworker tweeted something kind of sad about a layoff at her old job and my thumb went for the star reflex before my brain caught up, and now there's a little heart notification sitting in her mentions that makes it look like I thought that was a nice sentiment to publicly endorse rather than just "I saw this and wanted to remember to check on her later." I ended up un-hearting it and just texting her instead, which honestly should have been the first move anyway, but that's a separate complaint about my own phone habits.
Anyway. I don't think this is a hill worth dying on in public the way some people have made it (there was a solid week of people vowing to leave the platform over a button, which, sure, go ahead, see how that goes) but it's the kind of small interface decision that changes behavior in a way the redesign notes never mention. A star is a note to yourself. A heart is a signal to someone else. Those are different actions and Twitter merged them into one tap.
Back to Cyber Monday for a second because I do have one actual opinion on it: if your site can't handle a surge in traffic on the one day a year you know for certain is coming, that's on you, not "unprecedented demand." I watched a fairly major retailer's checkout page spin for forty seconds this morning before timing out entirely, and I just closed the tab and bought the thing somewhere else for two dollars more. That's the whole lesson of online retail in one sentence and somehow every November someone relearns it live.
I'm going to go actually finish that Newegg order before the code expires. Or I'm going to close the tab out of spite. Fifty-fifty at this point, honestly.