The settings page of an app is probably something that you don’t visit often but is crucial to how you use or even enjoy the platform. So if it’s a bit confusing and hard to find, it can be annoying and you’d rather not change anything about it or worse, just not use the app anymore. Most people will probably not give up Facebook for this reason but at least now the social media giant is making more efforts to make their settings more streamlined and more accessible.
The redesign has started rolling out to mobile app users starting this Wednesday. What users will see is a less cluttered settings section without the descriptions in the individual settings so you’ll see more items in the page itself. The organization of the items has also been streamlined. There are now six categories that you’ll see there: Account, Preferences, Audience and Visibility, Permissions, Your Information, and Community Standards and Legal Policies.
With these categories, hopefully it’s easier for users to find and navigate the specific settings they want to modify or take a look at. Facebook says they have reduced the categories and renamed them to “match people’s mental models”. Some of the other standalone settings have been placed under the categories they belong in. For example, News Feed setting is now under Preferences with other similar settings.
If you still don’t know where to look for a setting that you want to fix, they’ve also made improvements to the search function. This way you can supposedly easily find what you need even if you don’t know the exact name of where you can find what you’re looking for. Probably a lot of users are still not familiar with settings names and location so a robust settings search engine will be most useful for them.
The new Facebook settings has started rolling out to the Android and iOS apps, mobile web, and FB Lite. They said they’re confident that more people will be able to use the settings with this new layout and streamlined format.
