Last week  was Facebook’s 6th Birthday. We were invited to an exclusive party they put on for employees and their friends announcing cool new features (like the new homepage), along with revel in the fact that now over 400 million people are connecting with their friends and family through a tool that was built in a dorm room.

Before flocking to the party, some hard working engineers began rolling out a new way to navigate around the site to a subset of it’s users. Like previous updates to major sections of the site, the new layout may have caught some people off guard, despite them announcing these changes at one of their developer roadmap sessions last year. And in due new-feature fashion, many folks may cause an uproar asking Facebook to change things back to the previous navigation style.

But the good news is that we’ve been through this before. I’ve even taken my initial feelings of being uncomfortable towards change and boxed them up as well, banking on the probability that I will be use to them in a couple of weeks, or days even. Overall, they seem to solve a few large complaints that people had with the previous navigation style, beginning with the homepage.

Facebook in Higher Education: Facebook's new homepage

Unified navigation

Left-hand Rail Navigation

At the top left of the Facebook screen, next to the Facebook logo, are three buttons with drop-down functionality for your requests, messages, and notifications. This alleviates the habit of monitoring both the bottom right portion of the screen for new notifications. Also, when you received a new message in your inbox, it was difficult to tell unless you memorized the number of messages in your inbox, and noticed the difference. Now, the red number that made notifications easily noticeable is there for inbox messages as well.

Simplified access

On the left side of the page is a new bar for everything that needs browsing. Facebook finally bifurcated the types of notifications that we receive. Personal items, including news feed items that we like, comment on, or create are on the top navigation bar, while notifications from applications, games and pages, are on the left hand navigation rail. It seems that this decision was made after they noticed the main reason people stay logged into Facebook: interaction with people they care about.

Apps Get More Relevant

Facebook Applications now get more prominent placement.  Now users can go to their favorite apps more conveniently, and users that forget that apps exist will be constantly reminded of the opportunities to engage with their friends and communities in new and meaningful (and possibly silly) ways.

Facebook in Higher Education: New Applications Placement

Other changes

Two subtle changes that caught our eye were the search bar being centered instead of right-justified, the options under the status update box are hidden until the search box is activated. This is one more step towards simplicity and ease of use that most designers could appreciate.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaking, and our co-Founder and CTO George Deglin taking a photo with his iPhone