Update 2: Facebook announced today that the changes are rolling out. With the new design, you can view stories by News feed (what Facebook deems the most interesting stories in your feed) or Live feed (everything in real-time).
Why they did it:
Facebook’s Raylene Yung explains: “While seeing real-time activities is extremely valuable, we also want to be sure you don’t miss other interesting content. After hearing feedback from many of you and exploring some new designs, we decided with today’s changes to move what you used to see in Highlights from the right-hand side to the News Feed view in the main column so you can more easily engage with both views.”
Update: Facebook sent the following messages to advertisers:
Facebook is simplifying the user experience on the home page by introducing Top News and Recent Activity streams. Now, when users log on to Facebook for the ?rst time in a while, they will see the most important stories that they missed while they were away. From there, users can navigate to the real-time stream and toggle between both views throughout their sessions. In addition to making it easier for users to view content that is most relevant to them, this change also speeds up the time it takes for the home page to load and makes birthday reminders more prominent.
Ultimately, Facebook believes these changes will increase engagement on the home page by surfacing more relevant stories to users.”
Mashable has more screenshots.
Original Article: The Next Web got a hold of some screenshots of what were rumored to be of a new design being tested for the Facebook news feed and home page. There was some question as to whether or not they were real, but Facebook has confirmed that they are indeed testing, according to the the site.
The Next Web claims Faceboook gave the site the following statement:
“We are currently testing different designs of the News Feed and the home page with select users. The tests help us understand if we can make it easier for users to balance both the most important and the most recent information from people they’re connected to.”
The new design of the feed does not display the publisher box until an “update status” button is clicked upon. The feed also displays as separate pages with different links depending on which one you’re actually on. There are options for “recent stories” and “top news.” According to the Next Web, the Top News option filters updates with the most comments and likes.
The Next Web has several screenshots posted, such as the one below.
As is to be expected, reactions about these possible design changes are mixed. It’s hard to say what Facebook will actually do. That will depend on the tests, but Facebook has had plenty of uproarious feedback in the past over design changes, although the last several less drastic ones have gone over fairly smoothly.
It will be interesting to see what Facebook’s decision ends up being and how users react.
