Twitter has been testing out a new design. Apparently they are running A/B trials, restricting the design rollout to only some users.

Here’s an overview of the changes:

New navigation

In the global nav, they’ve added a dropdown list of top trends. Also, profile and settings links have moved next to the profile picture.

Trends dropdown

Top trends are listed as links leading to the search results page for that keyword.

Search results

The search results page has changed to include more information about users, which shows that Twitter is increasingly looking to enable discovery of new people to follow. Something that has been a labour of love in the past. They’ve added two new modules on the right hand side:

Matching users

Users real names or Twitter usernames are matched against the search query.

Featured user

It’s unclear what algorithm is driving the featured user. Possibly the same mechanic behind the “suggested users” feature seen upon registration.