This article was published on August 5, 2021

Facebook has redesigned your settings — good luck figuring them out all over again

Again!


Facebook has redesigned your settings — good luck figuring them out all over again Image by: Unsplash/ Solen Feyissa

If you had gotten used to navigating Facebook’s settings, time to wake up and get to work again. Because the company is rolling out a redesigned settings page on its mobile apps.

The new design has a total of six categories: Account, Preferences, Audience and Visibility, Permissions, Your Information, and Community Standards and Legal Policies.

With this design change, some of the earlier sections such as Security, Privacy, Ads, and News Feed settings have been clubbed under some of these categories. Plus, remember how the earlier version had a description below each category? Those have been removed too. So, good luck navigating through these new sections. 

A comparison of Facebook's old and new settings page
A comparison of Facebook’s old and new settings page

Why do you think Facebook made these changes? Glad you asked. This is what the company had to say about it:

That’s why we’ve reduced the number of categories, and renamed them to more closely matchpeople’s mental models.

What the heck is a mental model? Now I have to learn what my mental model is just so that I can navigate an app’s settings? Thanks, Facebook.

One of the good things about this change is that the company has added a shortcut for your account’s privacy checkup in the settings. So you can quickly run a test to make sure your data is being used the way you want it.

The new settings redesign has started rolling out to Android, iOS, mobile web, and Facebook Lite app starting today.

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