Converging Social App UI patterns

If you’ve used Instagram before, you’ve surely noticed how it handles DMs when shared from the home feed.

I was scrolling through my Twitter feed today and accidentally tapped on the DM button that resulted in this:

Looks like Twitter took a hint from Instagram on how to easily share tweets between users in private.

I’ve never used this functionality much before (or Twitter DM at all) but removing friction caused by context switches is certainly a step in the right direction and actually I can see how I am now more likely to initiate conversations based on interesting tweets I find.

This is also a win for the user, as they are already familiar with the experience flow, just in a different app. It’s certainly interesting how in the social space we see a convergence of the general user experience and offerings – recall Instagram and Messenger going after stories that originated in Snapchat as they clearly saw that the approach works.

Let’s see how this works out for Twitter.