Oprah didn't screw up, she found a usability problem! (Twitter)

Owen Thomas of ValleyWag made fun of Oprah for failing to hit the "update" button and losing her first tweet:

The show starts with Oprah excited about joining Twitter. (How
adorable!) We know Oprah just got on Facebook a month ago and Twitter
is all new to you. But how could you manage to hit "Refresh" rather than "Update" on your first tweet?

Link: Oprah Fails to Tweet on Her Big Twitter Show (Valleywag).

Hang on a second... I bet quite a few people have lost their first tweet because they didn't know to click "update."  First off, the word is a little odd. It's not the most natural of verbs and there are better choices. How about "Post", "Send", "Submit", or just "Tweet"... you get the idea.

Second, look how subtle that button is (it's not even visible in the video capture on Valleywag). The shading gets more prominent when you mouse over it, but that's just eye candy* and doesn't help with usability. You'd see it better if it always had that shading.

Third, it's not unreasonable for a user to think that maybe Twitter would process your typing as you go, or after a delay, without requiring any button presses.

Of course this is pretty small as usability problems go, but the point is it's not necessarily the user's fault. I post it because I feel compelled to keep trying to get people to stop labeling things "user error," which I think is part of the whole idea of usability.

By the way, I too have joined the twitterverse (karthur) though my tweets will surely be far less interesting than Oprah's. (And less timely, as you can tell by how many days have passed since this event happened.)

* Not that there's anything wrong with eye candy, of course. I feel I should add this clarification given that there's a popular article making the rounds with the aggrieved-sounding title In Defense Of Eye Candy (and it's a good article, but I don't know many people who would disagree with it). Eye candy has its benefits. I'm a true believer.. heck, in a previous lifetime I wrote a bunch of the code for a product called eye candy.