A deck of cards: how Facebook went about redesigning News Feed

Facebook’s newly unveiled redesign of News Feed looks good. It’s a lot more personalised and highly visual. Believe it or not Facebook didn’t do it just to get up your nose either.

Jane Leibrock, a UX specialist at the social networking giant, explained how the News Feed team went about giving the product a new look.

According to Leibrock, the process started out by interviewing research participants and asking the to describe what action they’d take in order to “de-clutter” their feeds if they could. The responses apparently had little to do with News Feed’s visual appearance:

Some said they’d “de-clutter” by removing page posts from their feeds. Others said they’d clear out stories about friends’ activities on the site, such as listening to songs and playing games. Many people mentioned wanting to get rid of stories about friends liking or commenting on others’ posts. “Clutter,” it turned out, referred to stories people don’t want to see in their feeds.

When Facebook looked at its data though, it found that those were precisely the things people were clicking most on. That’s why it came up with the solution of multiple feeds, “each with its own focus on a particular topic, type of content, or type of friend”.

That was a good start, but it still had to be filtered a little further. Leibrock had to establish which feeds Facebook should be offering and which stories to show. Rather than just asking people straightforward questions, she adapted a method known “card sort,” which researchers usually turn to in order to understand how people mentally relate different topics to each other:

I gave each participant a stack of recent stories from their feed, printed out on paper, and asked them to pick out the ones that interested them and discard the rest. Next, I asked them to sort the remaining, interesting stories by putting them into piles separated by what they liked about each.

An analysis of participants’ piles and the stories they’d put into them yielded clear themes. Unsurprisingly, many people made categories of stories they liked because they contained photos, and a majority of participants created a category of posts by people they felt close to. Something we weren’t expecting, though, was the large number of participants who created categories of stories they liked because they related to their interests; these were mainly full of posts from pages and people they were following. Another surprise was that many people created a category specially for stories that came from friends they didn’t necessarily feel close to but were glad to see occasional updates from on Facebook.

The themes from Leibrock’s sorting study apparently went directly into the team’s decisions about which feeds to make available to people.

“A ‘Photos’ feed,” she says, “had been a no-brainer from the start, and the idea of a ‘Close Friends’ feed had been in the mix and got more traction based on the findings”. The creation of a “Following” feed meanwhile was spurred by people’s “desire for stories related to their interests”.

Her research also produced the “All Friends” feed, which came from the fact that people “were interested in serendipitous discovery of stories from their full friend lists”.

So, if you hate the new look for News Feed, then you know who to blame.