Complexity Contagion – Twitter / Periscope / Vine

A friend of mine signed up for Twitter, and couldn't figure out to use it. She asked me for help. This is a highly educated, intelligent, smart person.

I was scanning 'scopes on periscope.tv on my laptop PC, and I really liked this one guy's scope. It took me a long time to figure out what his Periscope handle was (I had to simultaneously open the Periscope app on my phone, search this guy's name, and then click on each of the two people with the same name to figure out which one he was).

A couple of days ago, needing a laugh, I took the plunge and downloaded Vine on my phone. To start off, I wanted to see the most popular Vines ever (or in the comedy section). I was sure that would make me laugh. There was apparently no way to watch the top Vines ever, or even in any category. This is obviously a popular need, seeing that YouTube is flooded with compilations of popular Vines. (In fact, instead of losing all their traffic to YouTube, they should consider having a feature that seamlessly stitches Vines together to play them continuously without having to scroll anything.)

Twitter's complexity to new users is well known. I suspect this complexity is spreading like contagion to its other amazing products.

What's the solution here? Completely replace the product dev. teams with fresh eyes? Bring in end-users to test product? Bring in a Steve Jobs-like "editor" to "simplify, simplify"?

They have 2 clients for the same service (twitter). While that is probably a good thing in certain situations... as of now it seems like unnecessary overlap and a waste of resources.

As a heavy consumer of Twitter, and someone who is very intrigued by Periscope and Vine, it has me very concerned that even after identifying a key issue (end-user complexity), they seem to be unable to find a quick-fix.