Facebook shows off major redesign coming to desktop
Who doesn’t have a Facebook account?.. umm. At least we all had. There was a time when every notification was important to us. For most of us, Facebook provided a window into this glorious world of social media. But with time, platforms like Snapchat, Instagram got us hooked so badly most of us forgot about this legend.
In 2009, Facebook introduced a button that allowed people to give feedback to their friends’ posts. We called it Like, and people liked it a lot. It’s simple and effortless to scroll down your News Feed and tap the little thumb to acknowledge what your friend posted.
But, not everything in life is Likable. That’s when they released their new emoji pack.
However, it’s 2020 and Facebook is back with a triumph card. That is a new UI
Similar to the mobile app redesign last year, the new desktop layout gives you quick access to some major Facebook features and employs a cleaner, simpler design with more generous amounts of white space. The redesign includes larger fonts and sleeker icons, a dark mode, and a simplified layout with fewer columns of information to look at. Facebook Stories have been moved above the “Update Status” box, while just above the “Stories” section, there’s a redesigned menu bar housing several tabs previously found in the left-hand corner of the screen, such as Events and Marketplace.
Pretty much we use an app every day. Same though might have clicked the developers of Facebook why not make the website that resembles the app. With this new version of Facebook web view being released, it is going into engaging more people into the app world 🌎 and therefore you can see these tabs on the top👆 which are same in the mobile view.
Let’s Dive into the UI
The first thing we notice with this User Interface is that it has changed its logo and made the screen spacious and clean.
Logo
The new logo which used to be an f within a blue or white square is also different. The letter f is now in a brighter and lighter blue circle.
Horizontal NavBar
5 main tabs are present here and all of them have a blue highlighter:
Home ⚡: The heart of the app is the home tab. Facebook has worked hard to bring to you it’s best by moving the stories section nearer to the menu bar and then adding its beautifully crafted cards down. The developers of Facebook have made a change in this making it more user friendly.
The new interface uses a responsive design that displays content based on screen width and other parameters. If the width of the browser window is sufficient, Facebook displays a traditional but heavily modified three-column design.
Videos 📹: COVID-19 has already affected many people resulting in social distancing measures have inspired lots of people to live stream
The team is launching an audio-only mode, as well as automatic closed captions. It’s also giving people various ways to access a stream outside of Facebook, including logged-out support, which means people without a Facebook account can still tune into content.
Market 👜: Having elegant cards with an exact amount of box-shadow on it and details like price 💰, name 📝 and location 📍 displayed on it. We also a category section with FB’s default blue colour in less opacity and on selection it makes the icon bright with blue.
Groups 👦🏻👧🏼👨🏽👴🏿: The most significant change in the desktop’s design is the new Groups tab located on the new menu bar. Clicking on the tab will bring you to a personalized feed of updates from groups you are a member of while also suggesting groups for you to join based on your interests.
Gaming 🎮: Facebook has enhanced for gamers to stream comfortably.
They wanted to make it easier for people to find and connect around their favourite games, streamers, groups, and more. So the developers started to roll out a dedicated Facebook Gaming tab in the main navigation bar that will be a central home for people to discover, play, watch, and share gaming content personalized for them.
4 more icons on the right have a basic grey and black icon with a little bit of inner shadow on it. This would be the expected functionality:
New Post, Messenger, Notification, More
All of these will have a drop-down list 📄 so that there’s more engagement on a single page. This is a very good strategy used by FB to encourage more people into this.
On the left side of we have the typical search bar of Facebook and on the extreme right, we have the profile icon with user name displayed together.
This section is the best customization with I have seen so far 🔥🔥🔥. It has given priority to the cover page and less to the profile picture which makes it cleaner. Having a centre alignment enhances User Interface. Also, it has a single line of description displayed just like a single line describing yourself 🤖.
Vertical Navbar
FB is having multiple vertical navbars leftmost 👈navbar is having categories and rightmost👉 for chat options and promotions in it. Previously it had two separate sections one for promotions and other for chatting, but now they are clubbed together to reduce space.
Dark Mode 🌓
Much awaited mode in facebook is here now with the next update in it which is the dark mode.
In 2020, It is a necessity for an app or website to have a dark mode 💫 and it should be executed well otherwise it spoils everything. Facebook has used grey shades and black in the right places so that it makes the user experience is soothing for eyes 👀.
How to opt-in to the new Facebook for the web with dark mode
Click the small drop-down👇🏻 arrow in the upper right corner and look for “Switch to New Facebook.” If you don’t see the option, check back over the coming weeks.
Stories
Just like Whatsapp has the feature to view the stories in full screen and now Facebook is back with that same feature on it.
This feature can be reached by Facebook in Whatsapp too by including a more interactive UI and a better execution of this.
Messenger
Messenger will be making its way to both Mac and Windows and we got a glimpse of the app in dark mode on macOS. We didn’t get a firm release date for Messenger for desktop besides the app arriving this fall.
Messenger would take the lead among Facebook’s products to make changes in the direction of those new principles and also have the goal ⚽️ of being the fastest messaging service.
And enhancement of the “Friends” 🎉 tab that will be coming to Messenger where users will be able to see content from people they follow from Facebook.
Another update that will be coming to Messenger will be a “Watch Together” 👨👨👧👧 feature this encourages remotely connecting with friends to watch videos together.
Conclusion
Overall a great work is done by Facebook to release this update as people are more attracted to Instagram and Whatsapp in this new decade. The new design makes those two products more prominent, and Facebook hopes people will be more inclined to use them as reliance on the News Feed continues to shrink.
The new UI matches what the company launched on mobile last year and comes with a dark mode option when using Facebook in a browser.
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