When your "house" has more than a billion occupants, how it looks will not please everyone. However, with most people going mobile, Facebook has tweaked its News Feed to look more like its mobile platform.
Facebook announced Thursday that it will be rolling out a refreshed News Feed design in the coming weeks. The face-lift does not implement the changes proposed by Facebook last year, after the social network found out that the test group that tried out the redesign did not like most of the changes.
"Over the last year, we've spent a lot of time seeing what people were saying, what was working, what wasn't working, and we're rolling out the version that takes all of that feedback into account. Some parts weren't working and were just getting in the way for people," Greg Marra, Facebook's News Feed product manager, told technology blog Re/code.
"One of the things we have to figure out is how do we strike a balance between giving you very dense information and giving you things that don't require you to click a lot to understand it," Marra added.
After toying with the idea of having a Tumblr-like profile picture, huge images, and a revised right- and left-hand columns, the small population of testers did not like the changes that made navigation a bit more confusing for them.
"The updated design has the best of both worlds: it keeps the layout and navigation people liked, but offers bigger images and photos, as well as a new font. The current design on mobile remains the same," the company announced.
The most obvious reason with the latest changes is the consistency of the desktop environment with the platform people are familiar with on their mobile devices. The News Feed now provides a more visual experience ala Instagram and Google+ compared to the half-baked medium-sized images everyone is familiar with on Facebook. The design is gearing towards a cleaner look where stories are the center of attention. Fonts and icons have been modified, too.
"These changes are visual updates and do not affect how we surface content to people, nor do they change how stories are ranked in News Feed. Though in the new design all images are larger, both organic stories and ads will be the same size - similar to the way images appear on mobile," Facebook stated.
The new look of the News Feed is still to be judged and for sure, the social network is eagerly awaiting the verdict of its users. If it will be another flop, then the News Feed team will again have long hours playing interior designer to win the Likes of people.
