We recently added a twitter feed to our homepage. It was a good little user experience lesson and took a few iterations to get to something useful.

Here is a quick summary of the decisions we made:

• We wanted to show something current to attract interest back to the site, so we chose to just show the last 5 tweets only
• As we already have a blog and showing all tweets at once meant they were pushed below the fold, so we chose to use a carousel
• We chose to show each tweet in the carousel for 10 seconds. We had initially used 5 seconds but that didn’t give the user enough time to read and to follow a link in the tweet vanished
• As some users may have already read earlier tweets or just want to scan them, we gave them the ability to skip forward and back
• To get the maximum possible value we made all elements of the tweet clickable – links, users and soon we’ll add hash tags. We also made them open a new window rather than leave the site, so the user can open each link to read and stay on the site to open the next

They were our thoughts – what are yours?