March has been a month of Facebook design changes! On the 7th they made an announcement that they will be changing the news feed and then shortly after it was the profile timeline that would be getting a makeover also.
We’re going to just run through the Newsfeed changes (if you haven’t seen them already).
Newsfeed Redesign
Although this doesn’t seem like a big change, it really is. It’s the first big design overhaul since the timeline was introduced way back in 2011. Can you remember the outrage when timeline was introduced? People really hate change don’t they! Mark Zuckerberg has always said that the newsfeed is one of the most important parts of Facebook, so it is not surprising to see it have an update. In his announcement he said, “How we’re all sharing is changing and the news feed needs to evolve with those changes. This is the evolving face of news feed.”
There are three main ways in which the newsfeed is changing. First of which is the higher level of importance being given to pictures. They have increased the size of images to make the newsfeed a more visual place. Apparently nearly 50% of news feed posts are now made up of photos. At Giraffe, we quite like this change, I think it is easy to see where trends are heading, and placing more importance on photos and giving them their place on the newsfeed seems like a great idea to us.
Secondly, there is a new feature that will give the user much more control of their newsfeed. Allowing users to select from several different feeds, including: all friends, close friends, photos, music, etc.
Lastly, there is a lot of emphasis on mobile consistency. The new news feed has been designed with mobile strongly in mind, making it more congruent with the app versions of the site and the messenger. This was an obvious change as mobile internet use just continues to increase.
