Facebook, with every passing day, the need to make its user experience more user-friendly than before becomes more obvious —it’s redesigning the navigation bar on its mobile app to show users shortcuts based on their preferences.
Recently, the company has revamped its Marketplace section, made its news feed more friend-focused and changed algorithms to reduce fake news and clickbait. Now, Facebook is redesigning the navigation bar in its mobile app to better show you shortcuts to things you use most often. According to a report by CNET.
“We want the shortcuts available in the navigation bar to reflect how an individual uses Facebook,” said product manager Alexa Andrzejewski. “To that end, we’re customizing mobile shortcuts so everyone can more easily connect with their most frequently used products, such as Profile, Marketplace, Groups, Watch, and Friend Requests.”
How it works
The navigation bar, which is located at the bottom of the screen on the iOS app and the top on Android, If you click to open your Facebook app right now, you’ll see five icons (in this order): News Feed, Watch, Marketplace, Notifications, and Menu. With Facebook’s personalisation, though, only the three essentials – News Feed, Notifications, and Menu – will remain, while the other spots are taken up by any of five other categories: your profile, friend requests, Marketplace, Groups, and Watch.
The more you use a shortcut, the more likely it will show up in your main navigation bar. Anything not in the main bar will still be available via the Menu icon. Eventually, Facebook wants to add controls for you to customise which icons you see, rather than just automatically setting them according to usage.
An alert will be sent when the new icon is added to the nav bar. You’ll eventually have the option to select which icons you want to see in settings, but it doesn’t sound like that’ll be available at launch for whatever reason.
Facebook has been testing the feature since February, but the bar’s redesign is being rolled out worldwide over the next few weeks.
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