Facebook deploys a redesigned Messenger focused on simplicity

Facebook is releasing today a redesigned version of Messenger that tries to put the focus back on your discussions. After years of revenue-centric expansion into robots, games, payments and other sources of distraction, the company brings Messenger back to the essentials. Although all these extra widgets are still present in the application, most have been hidden in places where you can safely ignore them. The new Messenger continues to promote its business goals in the app, but overall, it's a welcome return to a time when the app was primarily a lightweight utility.

"Messenger is really powerful," says David Breger, product manager for the application. "But if you look at something like that, I do not know if the first word you would use is" simple "." Breger talks about the old version of the application, which has grown in the last five years in nine tabs.

It is useful to talk briefly about the complexity of Messenger. There were tabs for games, for people and for businesses. There were tabs for your friends who had open application, for your groups and for your past calls. The button to start a new text message had become a small square next to the search bar, while the most prominent real estate was reserved for a button to take pictures and videos.

Messenger had a version of ephemeral stories called Day, which was incorporated into your discussions. Whenever you have shared a private photo, Messenger has suggested you publish it publicly. (I did it several times – by accident.) Day was finally killed in favor of cross stories on Facebook, but the bad taste persisted.

Messenger was born in a simple way for Facebook users to send messages to each other while browsing them on the desktop. But in 2014, he created Messenger as a mobile app, which brought the former PayPal president, David Marcus, to run it. Facebook executives have taken note of WeChat's overwhelming success in China, which has become a digital wallet and digital identity system, and has strived to emulate it.

"We've built a lot of capacity over the years, but [Messenger] It's not as simple as the app was when we started our adventure, "said Stan Chudnovsky, who succeeded Messenger earlier this year when Marcus went to head Facebook's new blockchain division. "We had a decision to make here: we can continue to support ourselves, or we can build a new foundation that would really allow us to build simplicity and powerful features in addition to something new and something that goes back to the root."

I am sensitive to the challenges that the Messenger team faces. Their goal is to create a large enterprise around the world standardized (and expensive to operate) messaging applications. It's a hard thing to do – ask Snap. In addition, while users can complain about the functionality of Messenger, the application is used by more than 1.3 billion people a month. At this scale, every feature is used by millions of people. This makes it extremely difficult to completely eliminate the entities.

But something had to be done. When Facebook recently polled its users, 70% told the company that the most important quality of a good email application was its simplicity. With that in mind, Facebook went back to the drawing board – and where it was not possible to completely eliminate the features, it tried to consolidate them.

The new Messenger, introduced by Facebook in May at the developer conference, consolidates what used to be nine tabs in three. It still seems to me mostly familiar. The application opens in your discussions, just as before. The design uses a little more white space, although you can still see the same number of threads on one screen (six). The big photo / video button at the bottom is gone; it has been replaced by a smaller camera icon located next to the icon to send a new text message.

The central tab calls "people" and serves as a phone book. People who actively use Messenger at the same time as you will appear first in the contact list, and next to their name is an emoji hand that, if pressed, will send your friend a "wave" occasional. Staying consistent between the old Messenger and the new one, is that it always tries to make you start new conversations with friends, and therefore to use the application more. . This is the only explanation I can give to the numbered badge in the Contacts tab that tells you how many of your friends are active at a given time. I do not know what I'm supposed to do with the information that 77 of my friends are currently viewing on Messenger, but I know it now. (You can hide your active status from your friends if you wish, which will also remove the badge.)

One of the most disconcerting aspects of the new Messenger is that it shows you twice the Facebook stories: once on top of your chats, they are mixed with photos of your active friends on Messenger, and still in the People tab, where they are sitting in a row above your phone book. In a redesign that started from the principle of simplicity, redundancy around stories is difficult to justify. (Facebook says it had initially deleted the stories from the Contacts tab, but the test group asked that they come back. Thank you for nothing, test group!)

The last tab is called "discover" and this is where you will find games and businesses in a section called "for you". In theory, they are personalized, but in practice I found them irrelevant. My best suggestion is a company that invites me to "Discover the secret of learning English" – a rather harsh critique of my work. There are also insurance companies, cleaning services, games and a variety of robots that you can invite to interrupt you throughout the day with information, sports scores, horoscopes and more. ;other information. In the Discover tab, there is a secondary tab called "companies" that provides a directory of brands.

Along with the consolidation of the tabs, the Messenger team has made a handful of changes to individual discussions. You can now change the color of a gradient discussion, so that the color changes as you scroll up and down. It seems very good. You can also assign a nickname to anyone in any discussion, which is useful for tracking. And there's a new gesture for making phone calls and video chats: just swipe your finger over a person's name to display the corresponding icons. In the coming months, Messenger also plans to add a very neat dark mode.

Of course, the cats themselves are still loaded with features. Each discussion gives you the opportunity to send a text, an emoji, stickers, a voice memo, a photo or a video. Tap on the new four-dot icon and you'll see everything that has been accumulated in what I consider to be the messy messenger drawer: location sharing, games, GIFs, bots and reminders. (Who uses Messenger as a reminder app, exactly?)

Last week, I used the new Messenger, and I'm a fan of its sleek appearance. My favorite era of Messenger came just after it was released from Facebook's flagship application, while it was actually a text messaging app with a growing list of cute stickers. The redesign of the project brings him back in this direction, which is a rare case when a company gives up its greater ambitions to focus on customer satisfaction. In practice, the new Messenger is not really faster, it is simplified. There is less of what you do not want and more of what you do. It's a welcome change of pace.

Nick Statt contributed to this report.