Facebook Messenger App Is Undergoing A Total Redesign
Previously, the Facebook Messenger application had nine separate tabs for its over one billion users. The company will be rolling out a newer version of the messenger app with considerably fewer tabs in hopes to make ease of use even more efficient. Those nine tabs will be taken down to only three, reports CNBC.
Vice President of Facebook Stan Chudnovsky recently spoke at a press event today, discussing these changes to the messenger application and its upcoming features.
“This is a new foundation that will give us the ability to start building way faster, way better and way more powerful features.”
According to Chudnovsky, these three newly condensed tabs are going to be titled Chats. The Chats will include Conversations, People — which will include Stories and active contacts — and Discover — which will be reserved for games and chats with businesses.
It is not expected that changes to monetization will be seen right away, says Chudnovsky. What he and the company are hopeful for is that the condensing of tabs to a more finer, neat appearance and ease of accessibility and organization will make it more “obvious” to people that Facebook Messenger is not only a place to discuss topics and chat with friends and family but also an application where people can talk business as well; perhaps an aspect that many people are not currently considering. Yet it is documented that 10 billion messages are being sent between people and businesses each month.
The “refreshed” design is meant to integrate all of its new features in a far less complicated and perhaps intimidating way, meanwhile paving the way for new features such as the soon to be “dark mode,” which Chudnovsky mentioned during the press event. Dark mode looks from sample photos to be exactly as it’s name suggests — a darkened version of the application with neon colored text bubbles and icons atop a pitch black grid.
Already Facebook has compiled new features, some similar to that of Snapchat’s Stories; a feature that allows users to post temporary photos or videos into a separate feed from the person’s personal page where friends and family can view. This feature notably boosts time spent using the Facebook app and does, in fact, offer monetization potential to Facebook due to this.
Over the years, critics of Facebook Messenger have said that the application is clunky due to all of the newly added features, making for an overly complicated user experience.
