If Facebook Messenger’s redesign succeeds, you won’t really notice it even happened. I hardly did over the past week of testing. There’s just a subtle sense that the claustrophobia has lifted. Perhaps that’s why Facebook decided to throw a big breakfast press event with 30 reporters today at its new downtown San Francisco office, complete with an Instagram-worthy donut wall. Even though the changes are minimal — fewer tabs, color gradients thread backgrounds, and a rounder logo — Facebook was eager to trigger an unequivocally positive news cycle.
Old Messenger vs New Messenger
In the seven years since Facebook acquired group chat app Beluga and turned it into Messenger, it’s done nothing but cram in more features. With five navigation bar options, nine total tabs, Stories, games, and businesses, Messenger’s real purpose — chatting with your friends — started to feel buried. So today Messenger is rolling out a simpler interface with a lot more white space, a little less redundancy, and a casual vibe. Here’s a comparison of the app before and after.
Old Messenger:
Previously, there were five main navigation buttons along the bottom of the app. Between the actually useful Chats section that’d been invaded by Stories and the chaotic People section, there were tabs for calls, group chats, active friends, . Between then a camera button that aggressively beckoned you to post Stories, a dedicated Games tab, and a Discover tab for finding businesses and utility app.
New Messenger:
Now there are just three navigation buttons. The camera button has been moved up next to the chat composer inside the Chat section above Stories, People now contains the Active list as well as all Stories by friends, and Discover combines games and businesses. The fact that Stories is in both the Chats and People section make it seem that the company wants a lot more than the existing 300 million users across Facebook and Messenger opening its Snapchat copycat.
All the old features are still available, just not quite as prominent as before. The one new feature is several color gradients you can use to customize specific chat threads. If you rapidly scroll through the messages, you’ll see the bubble background colors fade through the gradient. And one much-requested feature still on the way is Dark Mode, which Facebook says will launch in the next several weeks to reduce glare and make night time usage easier on the eyes.
Finally, Messenger has a softer new logo. The sharp edges have been rounded off the quote bubble and lightning insignia. It seems designed to better compete with Snapchat and remind users that Messenger is fun and friendly as well as fast.
With the company’s downward scandal spiral of breaches, election interference, and fake news-inspired violence, it’s not just Messenger that’s a mess. It’s all of Facebook, both literally and metaphorically. Cleaning up, fighting back — those are the messages the company wants to drive home.
Facebook scored a win on this front last week by getting dozens of journalists (myself included) to breathlessly cover its election “war room”, until everyone realized they’d played themselves for page views. Today’s Messenger event felt a little like deja-vu as Facebook drilled the word “simple” into our heads. And with the news going live just an hour after the event ended, many reporters stayed, writing their posts about Facebook while still inside Facebook.
from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2Pp7Zsp
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