Facebook Launches Its New Unified News Feed Design
Today at Facebook HQ, in Menlo Park, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new look for News Feed that uses a “mobile-inspired” consistent design across all devices. The new News Feed design lets you get into specific type of content, and offers larger, more immersive, images and videos. Zuckerberg referred to the new design as a better personalized newspaper, that has a lot of diversified content and allows you to see the types of content you want to see, not what others say you should see.
Rich Content
One of the new features of the new News Feed is how it will focus on the photos, including an updated photo album design. Another new feature allows content shared by friends to be much more immersive, for example, you’ll be able to see the videos in-stream, as well as what each of your friends are saying about the content they’ve shared. If your friends share a link, it will include the logo of the site it’s being shared from to make it easier for people to find content that they like to follow in their News Feed.
When your friends add new friends on Facebook, the new design allows you to get a better idea of who they are adding as friends or what pages they’re liking on Facebook. The new design displays the person’s or page’s cover photo, profile picture, and more right within the News Feed.
Additionally, when people check-in to places on Facebook, the new design will bring prominence to the check-in, with a map and description front and center.
Multiple Feeds
The new Facebook News Feeds offers the ability for people to switch through their News Feed with the new feed switcher. A big request Facebook users have made is to have the ability to see everything their friends are doing on Facebook. Now you can see all of that with the brand new All Friends feed — it shows everything in chronological order. The same type of experience can be had with your music, games, photos shared by friends and pages you like, as well as people you follow on Facebook.
One important note is that the following feed is also listed in chronological order, so publishers can be ensured that people who “Like” their page will see everything that they’re posting. Which is key, as it’s something publishers have been up in arms about lately.
Unified News Feed
The new design really is a unified experience, Facebook really worked hard to get the design for the desktop to also match that of mobile devices. This is great for both users and publishers, as it allows users to feel comfortable using Facebook on all devices, while publishers can be happy knowing that their content will look the same on every platform.
Facebook also brought over a lot of the mobile experiences over to the desktop, such as how the Facebook app lets you know when new stories are posted in your News Feed.
Facebook is planning to start rolling out this design on the web (desktop) today, and will start rolling out to mobile devices within the next few weeks. It’s also worth noting that the design will be rolled out slowly on the desktop, because it is such a different design and they want to make sure all the bugs are fixed (and that there isn’t a massive user revolt) before they roll it out more broadly.
The New Design
You can sign-up/join the waiting list for the new News Feed design here.
