With all of the hubbub around the redesign of Twitter's website and applications, I thought it'd be interesting to consider what social media properties are in dire need of a redesign. One sticks out: Tumblr.
The dashboard interface
This screen is the heart and soul of Tumblr. It's a constant feed of people you follow on the service, but it could stand for improvement.
Relevance
Facebook's Top Stories feature -- as controversial as it can be -- is absolutely brilliant and should be the benchmark. I stayed away from Facebook for an extended period of time (three days) and when I came back, it had all of the important life events of the people that I might have missed out on.
Tumblr could embrace this sort of concept by providing a top stories feature: combine the sources you typically like and display popular stories from those sources. In the spirit of options, users could choose to keep the vanilla chronological view.
Trending tags
Tumblr has a great Explore page, which highlights popular tags. Like Twitter, Tumblr could surface the most popular tags at a specific time, encouraging exploring and finding other sources. It's not enticing enough for a typical user to click the little "Explore more tags" button on the right-hand side of the screen.
Click-to-animate
Tumblr's iPhone app includes a nifty feature: instead of loading and playing an animated gift automatically, users have to click a button. As someone who pretty much hates animated gifts and thought they were dead and gone in the last decade with the advent of Internet video, an optional click-to-animate feature would be lovely.
Combating spam
Spam is obnoxious on Twitter. No service is completely spam-free, but Tumblr is especially challenged at figuring out who is a spammer. Merlin Mann sums this up pretty well.
The compose screen
The point of Tumblr is to have a blog and, yet, something's missing. A clean, way to compose text blog posts. The box is just too tiny to fit more than four paragraphs of writing in, leaving proofreading to be almost impossible. Yes, while copy-and-paste is obviously supported, I think it would be great if Tumblr could give the compose screen some fit and finish to make it a serious writers' platform.
Nevertheless, Tumblr is a superb blogging platform, because it's built on simplicity and making it easy to share content that users find interesting. These changes could make it from an awesome distraction to a serious service to watch.