Facebook Promises To Simplify Its Messenger App In 2018

Social media platform, Facebook, wants its users to give the Messenger app another chance. Facebook Messenger Vice President, David Marcus, listed a series of predictions for the texting app, many of which have to do with streamlining the user experience.

As Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg previously stated in a blog post, the platform will focus more on creating meaningful interactions between its users. This means pushing back brand advertisements or passive content to make way for more user posts. The changes will become apparent throughout the year, thanks to Facebook’s drive to overhaul its News Feed.  Thus, it makes sense for the Messenger app to fall in line with Zuckerberg’s vision of promoting user experience. The first issue that the company aims to solve is the app’s complexity.

“The app became too cluttered,” wrote Marcus on Tuesday “Over the last two years, we built a lot of capabilities to find the features that continue to set us apart. A lot of them have found their product market fir; some haven’t,”

In the post titled,’ Six Trends of 2018’, Marcus acknowledged that not all features were there to ease user experience. He says that Facebook will invest more in simplifying and streamlining Messenger this year.

More so, the Facebook executive predicts that the messaging market will lean towards visual messaging rather than being purely text-based. According to Marcus, people will expect highly responsive cameras, GIFs, stickers, and videos. He states that even formal environments such as workplaces will adopt emojis and videos to simplify ideas.

Facebook added emoji characters and other similar features to Messenger in the past two years. According to the Facebook executive, Messenger had 17 billion video chats in 2017, two times as many as compared to the year before.

Image Source: Flickr