Facebook Revised Its Settings Layout, Making It Simpler to Locate Each Element

Facebook has revised the app's settings page to quickly access the varying tools and features available to modify and enhance your on-platform interaction.

As seen here, the new layout offers more space between every component, without much text on the main screen to obstruct your view and effectively direct you to each option. This also combines a few other elements, decreasing the number of main options presented - for instance, the new 'Payments' menu will include all payment tools, rather than listing them separately as they are now.

According to Facebook:

"Whether it’s managing the ads people see, adjusting sharing settings, or curating an audience for posts, people shouldn’t have to think too hard about where to start. That’s why we’ve reduced the number of categories, and renamed them to more closely match people’s mental models."

Facebook says that the settings display is now divided into six general categories, each with its own set of tools and options.

The categories are as follows:

• Account

• Preferences

• Audience and Visibility

• Permissions

• Your Information

• Community Standards and Legal Policies

It's unquestionably a more simplified concept, with the tidier and more concentrated layout making it simpler to access what you're after, as well as helping users effectively identify the different tools available.

According to Facebook, the new layout has allowed it to move a few other self-contained options into the display, along with related settings.

"For example, the News Feed setting, which previously lived in a smaller category of its own, now lives under Preferences where it's grouped with similar settings."

As such, instead of having all of your options displayed in their various functional areas, you'll now be able to update your Preferences from a single location.

Facebook's settings search tools have been changed to allow users to locate the element they need, and the 'Privacy Settings' category has been deleted altogether, with each privacy element being transferred into other, related categories. This may seem to be a move by Facebook to limit the use of its privacy tools, but the company claims that grouping privacy tools into categories would better fit with how people want to configure their experience.

To be safe, Facebook has integrated a new Privacy Checkup shortcut to the top of the Settings homepage (as seen above).

The update does not really bring anything new in terms of functionality; instead, it reorganizes the elements towards a more user-friendly layout, which should best assist with how users try out and respond to every feature.

In any case, we could only rely on Facebook's claims about how users interact with their settings choices, but the illustration does show a more user-friendly, concentrated settings design, which may greatly enhance utilization.

Facebook's modified settings design is now available to all users on Android, iOS, the mobile web, and FB Lite.