According to Mark Zuckerburg, Facebook is trying to give everyone in the world the best possible personal newspaper. It should have high quality content from renowned sources, as well as what your friends and family are saying. It should be visual, rich and engaging. Now, almost 50% of the average news feed is photos and visual content. Page posts from businesses now comprises over 25%. This new News Feed design reflects this evolving face of news, and encompasses three main areas: Rich Stories, Choice of Feeds and Mobile Consistency.
Rich Stories
The goal of the redesign was to make our stories shine, and reduce the clutter that was impacting story delivery. In the new Facebook redesign, photos are larger and higher quality. Photo albums are similarly improved.
When posting linked articles, the image thumbnail is much larger, the title is more prominent, and descriptions are longer. Additionally, the logo of the publisher is now included in the lower right corner of article summaries.
Profile images are now larger, and the cover photo area now includes how many mutual friends you have.
Place check-ins include a detailed map, location image and details about that place.
Third-party applications like Pinterest and Instagram that get shared to Facebook now receive better treatment and more focus.
Shared articles and videos now look fantastic. Not only is the content of the story larger and more stunning, instead of a small piece of text saying who has shared it, you will actually see thumbnail images for your friends down the ice of the story if they’ve shared that same article.
Events and stories shared from Pages are now included in Most Shared sections.
When you like a topic within your profile, not only will see you posts from that topic, you can now receive posts about that topic.
Choice of Feeds
Users may want to see different kinds of information, like music or photos. Now, there’s a switcher at the top of the page that will let you change to different kinds of feeds.
All Friends will show every single post from every single one of your friends in reverse chronological order, so you can make sure you haven’t missed anything.
The Music Feed can show what your friends are listening to, what concerts are happening, or other news and information about your favorite musicians.
The Photos Feed will show all of the photos that your friends have posted.
The Following Feed is just for the Pages that you’ve liked. It will display every single post from the Pages and public figures that you like. It is in chronological order, and is not impacted by EdgeRank.
Close Friends and Games remain the same, and your Lists will also remain intact.
All of these feeds will be available on every platform, both desktop and mobile.
Mobile Consistency
For the first time, not only will the Facebook interface be consistent across all devices, the desktop display was actually inspired by the mobile version!
Navigation is now global. You will not have to go back to the Home page to get to another section of Facebook, as you did before.
The New Stories bubble is just one of many subtle changes and improvements that have been implemented across the board.
These changes will be rolled out on the web today. Mobile versions will be rolled out over the course of the next couple weeks. The changes will all be rolled out gradually to give increasingly larger groups of users a chance to see the changes and provide feedback. This is becoming the standard for Facebook implementations.
Businesses will want to make sure that, going forward, articles and images posted to Facebook are large enough to support the new format. Images previously uploaded will resize if they were originally larger. Facebook Page profile pics, typically your business logo, may also need to be resized.
Let us know what you think of the new changes in the comments below.