Facebook News Feed Layout and Update: Social Network Scraps Drastic News Feed Design For Simpler Version
Social media giant Facebook had plans more than a year ago for a radical redesign of its News Feed but the revamp was recently scrapped with the realization that most of the company's users are working with older computers and laptops.
Facebook Art of Production Designer Julie Zhuo said in a blog post that her job is to design for the people and to make the things they do easier. She said that the redesign would have only helped a small portion of the social media's users.
"The design we tested a year ago wasn't better for the majority of people," she said. "It turns out, while I (and maybe you as well) have sharp, stunning super high-resolution 27-inch monitors, many more people in the world do not."
The new design would have made the site look more like its mobile app while also making the News Feed's content driven with larger photos and "more expressive stories."
Zhuo said the redesign tested well with larger monitors but on 10-inch notebooks single stories couldn't even fit properly. Under the revamp, site would have been harder to use for people whose computers don't have the trackpads or scroll wheels.
These people may not be early adopters or use the same hardware we do," Zhuo said, adding, "but the quality of their experience matters just as much."
Zhuo posted her blog in response to a blog post by Dustin Curtis, an entrepreneur, who wrote that Facebook threw out the redesign for the current one because it was bad for revenue. He said most users began spend more time on the News Feed rather than exploring the site's other popular areas.
"After an investigation into the problem by Facebook's data team, they discovered that the new News Feed was performing too well," Curtis said. "It was performing so well from a deisng standpoint that users no longer felt the need to browse areas outside of the News Feed as often."
However, Zhuo said the version that was tested last year would have actually been great for the company's revenue but opted to scrap the project because the redesign didn't sit positively with the users they showed it to, which was more important to Facebook.
"The old design was worse for many of the things we value and try to improve," she said. "Most of the people we showed the design to told us they didn't like more than what they previously had."