Marco.org

It’s dead:

Rather than continue to make changes to the QuickBar as it exists, we removed the bar from the update appearing in the App Store today. We believe there are still significant benefits to increasing awareness of what’s happening outside the home timeline. Evidence of the incredibly high usage metrics for the QuickBar support this. For now, we’re going back to the drawing board to explore the best possible experience for in-app notification and discovery.

This is a nice way to put it, but it’s obviously candy-coating the truth: that it sucked and should never have been released in the first place.

But good for them for owning up to the mistake and fixing it.

One little nitpick, though: of course Twitter’s metrics showed that it was used a lot. It was a large, new element at the top of the main screen. That doesn’t mean everyone who “used” it was happy about having done so, or clear about its purpose.

Tons of people must have invoked it just to figure out what it was, and given its size and position, I wouldn’t discount how many of the “uses” were probably from accidental taps. Usage metrics should attempt to account for this, for example, by separately tracking repeated invocations, or invocations that the user kept open for more than a couple of seconds.

I imagine they know this, and the simple statement in their post is just part of the PR-ification of the rollback.