After having shunned its radical News Feed redesign, Facebook today started rolling out an updated look for News Feed which it hopes that users will give a warm welcome. The update is quite obviously focused on cosmetic changes, majority of the text will now be displayed using new fonts, Helvetica for Macs and Arial for Windows PCs. Stories and posts are now displayed in a “card” arrangement that is reminiscent of the social network’s mobile applications. The left-hand column has been more simplified and photos are now larger, thus bringing the desktop experience closer to its mobile counterpart.
Since Facebook has a lot of users in a lot of countries around the world, the updated look won’t be available for everyone at the same time. Even though the roll out has been started today, it will take up to a few weeks for each and every one of its billion plus users to get the new News Feed look. Facebook hasn’t made any changes to the underlying algorithm as yet, so marketers need not worry, the new layout doesn’t change anything yet.
Though Facebook hasn’t clarified if it plans to make changes to the algorithm as well some where down the road. The social network paid attention to qualitative feedback from users when putting together this new look, it listened to what people liked and disliked so that the updated News Feed could offer an improved user experience. Has it been able to achieve that? Only the users will testify to that, once they get the new look.
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