Facebook redesigns news feed with larger link previews, circular profile photos
While mostly cosmetic, Facebook's changes are meant to make its social network easier to use.
A few months after Twitter tweaked the look of its feed, it’s now Facebook’s turn to make some mostly cosmetic changes.
On Tuesday, Facebook rolled out a redesign of its news feed that adopts circular profile photos (like Twitter did), enhances link previews of posts and makes comment threads more apparent.
In a blog post announcing the design changes, Facebook didn’t explain why it is swapping out the traditional square profile photos appended to people’s posts and comments for circular ones. However, seemingly every other social network — from Twitter to Instagram to Snapchat to Pinterest to LinkedIn — already uses circular profile photos.
Facebook’s changes to link previews are more than cosmetic. In addition to displaying slightly larger photos attached to a link, Facebook is adding a shaded background to link text to make it easier to read.
Facebook redesigned link previews with larger photos and shaded backgrounds. Source: Facebook.
And while Facebook hasn’t been criticized for a clunky or confusing user interface like Twitter, it is still cleaning things up. For example, it is enlarging the like, comment and share buttons attached to posts. And it will now display comments within message bubbles to make it easier to see when a comment is responding to the original post and when a comment is responding to another comment in a thread.
Facebook’s comments redesign makes it easier to recognize threaded comments. Source: Facebook.
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