14 DAY TRIAL // Just in time for its birthday, Facebook has rolled out a brand-new design which is a pretty big step from the previous one. A number of features have been changed, updated or even removed so it's more than a given that a lot of users aren't going to like it, the ones that complain about each single update Facebook has made throughout the years. The redesigned homepage has been popping up for a few months now, but Facebook is now rolling out widely, to 80 million people, out of the now 400 million, for a start.
"Over the past few months, we've been testing several different designs of the home page to improve navigation to and discovery of commonly used features. Today, we started rolling out the most recent navigation updates to help you find what you are looking for on Facebook. Now from the top and left menus you can quickly get to what's new and important," Facebook's Jing Cheng wrote about the update.
Probably, the most attention was paid to the top menu. In the left corner, there should be anything that warrants your attention. The private message inbox, notifications and requests all get bundled up together. The three buttons which replace the previous text links also light up when you have notifications and indicate the number of unread messages.
The Home, Profile and the Accounts menu get pushed to the right-hand corner with the new Accounts menu bundling the link to various config pages, Help Center and Logout. With all of these pushed to the sides, the center is left to the search box which is a lot more emphasized. It is now featured front and center and is also significantly bigger. This is an important move, as the social network definitely wants more people to do more searches on the site especially now that there should be a lot more content available thanks to the new, more open, default privacy settings.
The News Feed got a recent revamp focusing on surfacing the most relevant content in the increasingly busy feed. Now the feature got further tweaked as the news was renamed ‘Top News’ and the live feed was named ‘Most Recent.’ Facebook says that the chat is one of the most used features on the site, yet its significance was somewhat downplayed being relegated to the bottom app bar. The list of online friends is now prominently displayed on the left sidebar which should make the interactions on the site a lot more 'real-time'.
Speaking of the app bar, it's now completely gone as Facebook applications and games now get their own dedicated dashboards. Considering that the bar was copied, in one form or another, by almost any other web site out there, it should be interesting how the web design world reacts to this and whether other sites follow suite, on the premises that 'if Facebook has it', or in this case doesn't have it, then 'we must have it too'.
In any case, the new design should be coming to everyone in a matter of days and, while the backlash is probably already picking up Steam, most of the changes are for the better and reflect the site's updated goals. Time will tell if the new direction Facebook is heading is the right one, though the site has been known to make 180 degree turns so nothing is set in stone, but if the next six years turn out anything like the previous six, Facebook may very well become a synonym for the Internet.
