I'm a heavy Twitter user, and marketer, and use and love Hootsuite.
I just signed up, created one filter and one folder, so haven't spent a ton of time, but here's some initial feedback:
What problem are you trying to solve exactly? Your homepage says "easy Twitter filtering" yet the set up seems a bit complicated. Basically, from what I gather is you're another twitter client competing with Hootsuite, Tweetbot, Tweetdeck - all of which offer tweet filtering - so what is your key differentiator?
I think you're missing a differentiator - I can't find anything with your app that I can't already do with Hootsuite, so what would make me want to use TweetDig instead?
From a UX perspective, I would put Folder/Filter editing directly from the dashboard - an "Add Filter" button on the left side, and Edit option for existing filters (on hover, click, etc..) I had to search to find where to add/edit, and if your user's primary objective is filtering tweets, the ability to add/edit/manage filters should be much more prominent than buried under "Configuration".
You might want to consider looking at "Smarter filtering" with some natural language processing, machine learning, etc...
My biggest problem with saved searches and filters that I use is that often I'll get irrelevant stuff that clogs up those streams but does in fact match my criteria - I would see a ton of value in a twitter client where you can filter smarter - let me "ignore tweets in this 'filter' from this user", etc.. and go beyond simply matching criteria, to curate based on stuff I retweet, stuff I tweet, hashtags I use, etc...
My advice would be to focus on these things:
1. The ultimate problem you are trying to solve, and who has this problem? Find out what's most valuable to them in a solution.
2. User experience (not how pretty the UI is) but put yourself in your users' shoes, and do a walkthrough of your app. What is the objective your user is trying to achieve when they use your app, and are you making it as simple as possible for them to achieve that objective.
Unforunately, the filter set up is something that we're struggling to simplify.
Hootsuite, Tweetbot etc offer searching and muting based on tweet content. Tweetdig offers the ability to filter based on a wide range of criteria (such as filtering out tweets from a specific user like you mentioned). That's our differentiating factor.
Thanks for the comments on hiding add/edit/manage under configuration. We'll take a look at where we could fit them into the interface.
We're very interested in the user experience, and we've improved it a lot over the last few weeks. It still needs a lot of work, but we're finding that the first thing new users see is the design. I think to get them past that, we need to take a look at the UI. People don't seem willing to give things a try if it doesn't look pretty, no matter how easy it is to use.
So, isn't your filtering out a user the same as muting a user?
I just realized you can add multiple criteria (i.e. From X user, and Y keyword) ... that is valuable. I didn't realize you could do that. (Psssst - see, UX!) :)
I realize people want something pretty, and yes it's enticing but your question was why are people saying they love the idea, then signing up and not coming back. Do you have any user engagement metrics set up (using something like Mixtab) to see where the drop off happens? If you're seeing user growht, but low engagement it could be that the UX is not delivering on the value proposition.
Maybe get some friends/family who use twitter alot to sign up and give step by step feedback along the process and do some customer interviews.
We don't filter anything out, as that's against Twitter's ToS. We do however facilitate sending all tweets from a user into a folder you define. You can of course decide not to read that folder :)
The UX on creating filters needs work, I agree. You can make filters as complicated as you like! e.g. "Any links tweeted by @tweetdigapp with the hashtag #opensource".
We have metric tracking for most user actions. Home rolled though, and I've not heard of Mixtab. Will take a look at them, thanks.
I just signed up, created one filter and one folder, so haven't spent a ton of time, but here's some initial feedback:
What problem are you trying to solve exactly? Your homepage says "easy Twitter filtering" yet the set up seems a bit complicated. Basically, from what I gather is you're another twitter client competing with Hootsuite, Tweetbot, Tweetdeck - all of which offer tweet filtering - so what is your key differentiator?
I think you're missing a differentiator - I can't find anything with your app that I can't already do with Hootsuite, so what would make me want to use TweetDig instead?
From a UX perspective, I would put Folder/Filter editing directly from the dashboard - an "Add Filter" button on the left side, and Edit option for existing filters (on hover, click, etc..) I had to search to find where to add/edit, and if your user's primary objective is filtering tweets, the ability to add/edit/manage filters should be much more prominent than buried under "Configuration".
You might want to consider looking at "Smarter filtering" with some natural language processing, machine learning, etc...
My biggest problem with saved searches and filters that I use is that often I'll get irrelevant stuff that clogs up those streams but does in fact match my criteria - I would see a ton of value in a twitter client where you can filter smarter - let me "ignore tweets in this 'filter' from this user", etc.. and go beyond simply matching criteria, to curate based on stuff I retweet, stuff I tweet, hashtags I use, etc...
My advice would be to focus on these things:
1. The ultimate problem you are trying to solve, and who has this problem? Find out what's most valuable to them in a solution. 2. User experience (not how pretty the UI is) but put yourself in your users' shoes, and do a walkthrough of your app. What is the objective your user is trying to achieve when they use your app, and are you making it as simple as possible for them to achieve that objective.
Best of luck!