Skip to main content

Facebook’s new Messenger design is a rare simplification

[ad_1]


Facebook is a many-headed social hydra. There’s the original platform, built around the newsfeed; numerous acquisitions, from the photo-sharing platform Instagram to the international communication company Whatsapp; and spinoffs like Messenger, which is available within the Facebook mainframe and as a standalone app. The company has been accused of sending spam notifications on its main site, cluttering once-beloved apps like Instagram with unwanted new features, and intentionally designing all of its apps to monopolize our attention. But it announced Tuesday that Messenger is about to get simpler.



Instead of introducing tons of new features or crowding every page with features and graphics, the fourth iteration of Messenger is stripped down to the most essential functions. Yes, there are new color gradients for message bubbles, the usual supply of infinite gifs and stickers, and a tweak to the logo. But users will also see a serious Marie Kondo-ing (author of the bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up), as Messenger bucks the busyness trend and reduces its existing nine tabs to just three—chats, people, and discover.



The origins of Messenger trace back more than a decade, to Facebook Chat, which debuted in 2008. Nested within the larger social network, it functioned as a sort of an instant messaging service—a slightly sleeker AIM. In 2011, the chat service was rolled out as a standalone app for iOS and Android phones. Today, Messenger supports text-based notes and photos, voice calls and video chats, and even gaming. It can be used by with or without a Facebook account. According to its parent company, 1.3 billion people now use the communication service each month.



As Messenger’s usership has grown, so too has its built-in features. The app now includes a Venmo-like ability to send money directly through the app, and new ways to decorate messages like stickers and emojis, all of which are designed to appeal to customers on most continents. But some argued the continuous growth made the platform unwieldy, crowded, or uninviting—three things an attention-based service never wants to be. So Messenger decided to get back to basics.


Decluttering an app seems easy: just toss out the features you don’t like and utilize the rest. But simplifying the platform took roughly two years and the expertise of user interface designers, researchers with a keen eye for human behavior, and test users from eight countries to get right.



“Together with our research team, Messenger designers travel often to see how the app is used by people everywhere,” Loredana Crisan, Messenger’s product design director, told PopSci over email. Many communication preferences seem universal, she says. Seven in 10 people report that the app’s ease of use was its most important feature—a stat that emboldened the design team as they set about streamlining the app.



Researchers also found that the little draft button in the upper-right-hand corner wasn’t as important as they thought, according to Messenger’s head of product Stan Chudnovsky. Instead of starting a conversation from scratch, most users found the friend they wanted to message by scrolling through recent conversations. That’s why the relaunched Chat tab has been cleaned up and offers more chats at first glance; you can six recent messages visible in Facebook’s press rendering, compared to just four in the previous version.



Other message preferences seem to be shaped by regional culture, presenting a challenge to the designers of an app with global demand. “[I]n some countries, like Romania, my home-country, people spend a lot of time connected on voice calls, while in the [United States] text chat is more common,” Crisan writes. “Another difference we see often is around visual messaging: in Asia, stickers are very popular while in other regions people prefer gifs or emoji.” The result is that Messenger’s main page is standardized around three fundamental needs, but offers endless customization within each chat, where users can still find sticker sets, add nicknames, or assign conversations colors and emojis.



In addition to the glitz and glam, the retooled Messenger app will also have a few new functional services. The Chat and People tabs connect you to your friends and family, but Discover will connect users to businesses, encouraging them to message restaurants or stores for reservations or information about what’s in stock. The much-hyped group video chat, which can accommodate as many as 50 people, is available. And practical features like bill splitting and polling have also arrived.



Even with years of development and lots of pre-launch testing under the belt, the design team is anxiously awaiting public feedback on the redesign. “The biggest challenge is the risk of breaking the experience for them, since change is almost always unwelcome at the start,” Crisan wrote. Fewer tabs should make the app easier to navigate. And designers took pains to improve contrast on the page and make the user interface easier to read. “But right at the beginning it can feel disorienting, like someone came in and moved all your furniture around without asking you first.”



Fortunately, when compared to the sensory overload seen on its sister apps, Messenger’s realignment feels rather zen.




[ad_2]

Written By Eleanor Cummins

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to avoid the mid-movie bathroom break

[ad_1] Long movies and the urge to pee have been linked since the early days of cinema. Sixty-three years before Avengers: Endgame and its three-hour runtime, moviegoers settled in for nearly four hours of The Ten Commandments . “There will be an intermission,” director Cecil B. DeMille announced during the movie’s introduction. And audiences’ bladders were relieved. On average, movies aren’t getting longer, but they also don’t come with a predetermined bathroom break. That means when nature calls, you’ve got to either sit in growing discomfort or gamble on the best time to run to the restroom. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and for most people, setting your body to “do not disturb” is fairly simple. Go before the show The first piece of advice is also the easiest: pee before the movie starts. Generally, healthy adults urinate every 3-4 hours, so the longer a movie runs, the more urgent it becomes to reset your internal p...
Post a Comment
Read more

Charted: Here's how much your food waste hurts the environment

[ad_1] Our species is pretty good at wasting food. Some we discard at the farm for being undersized or oddly shaped. Others we allow to decay in their shipping containers, thrown away before they even reach shelves. We leave even more foodstuffs wasting away in grocery stores, often by letting it sit there until it reaches its sell-by date. As consumers, we don’t have much control over most of the process that brings our food to the grocery store, but we do have control over how much food we personally waste. Let's face it: We’ve all found liquified lettuce in our veggie drawers. Don't fret. It's arguably impossible to consume 100 percent of the food we buy. But a healthy reminder of the effect food waste has on the environment might help us all to be more conscious of the amount of food we eat—and don't eat. Consumer food waste varies extensively depending on the area. In South and Southeast Asia, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that only around ...
Post a Comment
Read more