Facebook’s News Feed is about to get very different

Facebook is always stirring things up on its News Feed. Now the latest update to its News Feed vows to make it more user-friendly. In an official blog post, Facebook’s Design Director and Product Design Manager wrote in detail about the new update which is expected to roll out to the mobile app soon.

Facebook’s News Feed is full of diverse content – text, photos, videos, and GIFs. In order to improve the readability of content on the app, Facebook is making updates to ‘refresh the look and feel’ of the News Feed. This means you will soon notice an increased color contrast and larger link previews which are bound to make everything more readable. The Like, Comment and Share buttons, which recently underwent a makeover to get a black border and white fill, are also going to get bigger and, hence, easier to tap and circular user profile pictures will be introduced on post comments. Note how Facebook has replaced its famous ‘globe’ icon for app notifications with a Twitter-like bell.

Facebook is also taking steps to improve how users navigate the News Feed. To make a more consistent user experience, the app will be updated to let users see where an external link will take them before they click on it. A more prominent back button will also be introduced that will take users back to the News Feed once they’ve finished reading an article.

And finally, Facebook wants its users to have better conversations and so the new update will bring with it a different style of comments. Comments will be posted in a gray bubble and users will also be able to see which comments are for the post and which comments are direct replies to another person.

However, if you run a page on Facebook don’t worry because the latest update to the News Feed will not affect your traffic or referral rate. However, if you happen to be a news media or content publisher, you need to be worried because another update from Facebook says that those pages will rank lower on the News Feed whose website is slower than the threshold value.

What do you think about Facebook’s News Feed update?