Fun fact: I didn’t have an X account until I came to the States in 2021. Not mainly because of the Great Firewall (a bit, yes), but because the app overwhelmed me.
As a non-native English speaker, I had to decode walls of text before I could decide whether I cared. My own starting point was wanting to follow tech conversations without everything else grabbing my attention.
I interviewed five people about how they managed their feeds, what the existing controls helped them do, and where they turned to workarounds.
Topics people had previously engaged with continued resurfacing, even when their attention had moved elsewhere.
Opening settings and configuring preferences felt like too much work when someone simply wanted to change what they were seeing.
Make the effect of each preference clear and predictable so people can trust how their choices shape the feed.
Make controls easy to find and quick to use, without buried settings or tedious manual cleanup.
Give people meaningful choices beyond follow or unfollow that reflect changing interests and different contexts.
Exploration
I compared five intensity levels with three levels and a separate duration control. I chose to simplify intensity while keeping temporary control explicit.
Earlier approach
More granular expression of topic preference.
Adjacent levels can be difficult to distinguish.
Revised direction
Clearer intensity choices, with a separate time boundary.
Less fine-grained intensity; duration is another choice to make.
I initially grouped intentional and exploratory browsing as different user types, then reframed them as changing needs within one person. Work and Personal became starting contexts for this concept, not an exhaustive classification of users.
Work and Personal describe the browsing context; For You and Following describe the feed source. I replaced independent mode toggles with an explicit Active selection so those two dimensions would not imply the same choice.
1Mode toggles and feed choices share one selector, without explicitly naming the distinction.
I placed the entry point beside the content that prompted the change. A reader can ask for less of a topic for a limited time without first navigating a separate settings workflow and adjust both intensity and duration from a post instead of muting a topic permanently.
1Five intensity levels offer finer control, but make adjacent choices harder to distinguish.
A quick change in the feed should not become a forgotten setting. I connected topic adjustments to mode management so people could review and edit them later, rather than only delete an interest.
1Trash icons make removal the visible editing action. Temporary changes have no dedicated place to revisit.
Some people want to shape a feed deliberately; others only want to correct something in the moment. This project pushed me toward progressive control rather than one complex settings experience for everyone.
I began by considering which features to add. The more consequential decisions were about how those features related: context versus source, a temporary adjustment versus an ongoing preference, and an action in the feed versus a place to revisit it.
After this concept, Threads introduced Dear Algo and Your Algo, giving people direct, time-bound ways to ask for more or less of a topic. To me, that reinforces the relevance of the need behind this project, rather than validating this particular solution.
That's the end of this story. If you're still curious, here are two more.
