Facebook and its various services like Instagram and Messenger are widely known to be overly crowded with unnecessary features and menus, but that may be changing soon with the rollout of Facebook Messenger 4. The company said that it ran a study on Messenger and found that 71% of participants considered simplicity a top priority.
What a wild concept that people just want to use Messenger to message their friends and family without rummaging through a clunky UI.
Rolling out globally over the next few weeks, Messenger 4 trims down from nine tabs to a much more reasonable three — Chats, People, and Discover. There's still a camera at the top of the app for sharing photos and videos to your messaging groups or your Facebook Story, and you'll still be able to play Instant Games through the Discover tab.
On top of simplification, there are also a few neat new features, including color gradients in conversations that make each message a different color gradually leading from, say, blue to red. Messenger 4 is also introducing Dark Mode, which should be good news to AMOLED users.
After years of clumsy and overcluttered designs, it's great to see Facebook making an effort to change for the better. Messenger 4 is being rolled out in phases, but again, you can expect to see the update some time in the coming weeks.
