Facebook is releasing a new News Feed design, and you might actually like it. With simplified columns and larger images, the redesign places more emphasis than ever on the content in your Feed. The redesign is rolling out to desktop users starting today.
Facebook first began this redesign of the about a year ago, although its first tested iteration was a flop. The left- and right-hand columns back then displayed too much information and were too complex to make users want to interact with them. With that experience under its belt, the Facebook News Feed team has left the columns flanking the Feed alone for the most part, besides trimming down the number of links on the left-hand side.
The new design features sleeker buttons for posting status updates and multimedia along with a new font for the bulk of the text (Helvetica for Macs and Arial for PCs), but where you’ll see the biggest changes will be in the News Feed pictures. Images will display full-width, making the News Feed more gorgeous and visually appealing than ever.
According to Product Manager Greg Marra, the redesign team doesn’t want to make the same mistakes it did with the original redesign. For this reason, the upcoming changes are informed by what actually works for Facebook users:
We wanted to pay attention to qualitative feedback this time. It’s hard to tell what’s working and what’s not so we talked to people as we did the update. We put usability studies first.
The design doesn’t appear to be too drastic a change for Facebook users, some of whom have been reluctant to accept major redesigns in the past. Perhaps starting with this redesign Facebook can, little by little, create the visually engaging News Feed it’s aimed to launch for some time.
Facebook recently released Paper, a social content reading app that allegedly began as an attempt to redesign the News Feed.
Image by TechCrunch
