The Problem

Twitter’s Home Timeline is fast and algorithmic, which is great for real-time discovery but not for focus. If everything is happening at once, it’s hard to stay locked into what matters most.

To address that, the team set out to build Custom Timelines: curated feeds created by partners and developers. These timelines would center on specific topics, events, or communities, offering a more intentional way to explore content.

But the early experience left some big questions unanswered:

What exactly is a custom timeline?

Who’s behind it?

Why should users follow one?

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My Role

I joined after the initial prototype had shipped, ahead of the pilot launches with partners like ABC, Bloomberg, USA Today, Epic Games, and Buzzfeed.

My focus was on improving the clarity of the experience, building reusable design patterns, and creating tools to streamline how partners curated timelines and worked with our team.

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Designing for Two Audiences

We were designing for two distinct groups:

People using Twitter, who would follow timelines

Partners and developers, who would create them

I worked closely with Alexa Verroi to design a set of reusable timeline components. These became part of our internal design system and helped ensure consistency across timelines from different partners.

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Partner collaboration and tooling

Partner timelines were taking too long to ship. Each one involved custom processes, unclear roles, and too many syncs. We introduced a shared workflow to bring structure, reduce back-and-forth, and move faster.

Streamlining collaboration

To help partners work more efficiently, I built a Figma toolkit that let them assemble timelines on their own using our components. This made it easier to collaborate asynchronously, reduced the need for repeated design reviews, and sped up engineering handoff.

Supporting discoverability

As Tony Pavés led the broader strategy for discoverability, I focused on how design tooling could support that work. The toolkit gave partners an easy way to check how their timelines would appear in different placements, including profile embeds and in-feed modules.

This helped ensure brand alignment across surfaces without adding extra back-and-forth.

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Research insights

We worked with AnswerLab to test early pilots, including The Bachelorette and Popular Videos timelines.

Here’s what we heard:

Users liked the concept of topic-based timelines they could opt into

Most didn’t immediately understand who curated the timelines, but were fine with it once they started using them

People wanted the option to remove a timeline easily

Content relevance mattered more than how it was introduced

This helped us refine both the messaging and the interaction model around timelines.

Early results

Even with limited promotion and no iOS support, early pilots showed meaningful engagement lifts:

Popular Videos → +9.5% login days

The Bachelorette → +13.6% login days

These results were promising, especially given the feature was still early in rollout.

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Reflection

Custom Timelines was a systems-heavy project that touched a lot of surfaces: design systems, partner tooling, internal prototyping, and end-user UI.

It required thinking holistically about how new formats are introduced, maintained, and understood–both by users and by the teams building them.

While the feature didn’t ship at full scale, the work laid a foundation for how Twitter could support curated experiences in a more structured, flexible way.

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What we delivered

Are designs ever truly final? Check out where we netted out: