Today, Mark Zuckerberg and the crew at Facebook announced some fairly significant design changes to the news feed. Bringing bigger pictures, better filtering of stories, and a consistent mobile design, Facebook’s goal is to allow users to more easily focus on the stories they care about and make those stories richer and more engaging. The three key elements in the design changes are:
- Rich Stories – The new design has a big focus on visuals, providing bigger pictures and videos, as well as providing more engagement by showing you who is sharing the content. Third party applications, such as Pinterest will have richer visuals in the feed as well.
- Choice of Feed – To help users focus on the stories they want to see, several new feeds will be available. An ‘All Friends’ feed will allow users to see every single post from all of their friends in chronological order. A ‘Music Feed’ will allow users to see posts about the music they like, and a ‘Photo Feed’ will comprise all photos that users friends and pages post.
- Mobile Consistency – Inspired by mobile design, the new look will be consistent across platforms, whether you’re on a laptop, tablet, or phone. With this new design Facebook is trying to “get Facebook out of the way and push the content to the front.” This mobile inspired approach provides a much cleaner, more modern feel.
The limited rollout starts today, hitting the website version first, then moving into mobile versions over the next couple of weeks. As with most releases, they will limit the rollout until they’ve had chance to get some user feedback and make adjustments.
What changes do you like (or dislike) the most?
This article was written by Jeff Howland, Community Manager at Dream Local Digital. Jeff grew up in Maine and has lived in the midcoast area for the last 13 years. Since graduating from the University of Maine with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering Technology, he has held positions within the industrial sector, as a software engineer, and the financial and marketing sectors, in a broad range of technology management and client support roles. Currently, Jeff is on the Boards of Directors for two local non-profit organizations in the public affairs and education sectors. As a Community Manager at Dream Local, Jeff works with businesses and non-profit organizations, managing social media networks, online and brand marketing, public relations, communications, and more, to ensure their online environments are consistent with and complementary to their traditional marketing and public relations strategies.When ‘unplugged’ Jeff likes to go for a run or sit down with a good book. Please contact Jeff at jeff@dreamlocal.com or connect online >> Twitter LinkedIn Google+.
