Yesterday there was a lot of discussion surrounding an updated version of the Facebook homepage that is currently being tested. The primary changes are that the publisher has been removed, and that users can switch between “Recent Stories”, which shows all recent feed items, and “Top News”, which shows the most popular items.

It’s the next iteration of the homepage and focuses on automatically filtering stories for users, something that has been missing for the most part since the latest redesign. While highlights have provided some form of filtering, this latest version replaces highlights and places “Top News” stories in the main stream area. Facebook continues to improve the overall site design, and with extensive user testing, they spend a fair amount of time ensuring that those users with the new design continue their engagement levels.

Why Not A Total Redesign?

So why doesn’t Facebook complete overhaul the design once again? That’s a question that Barton Smith attempted to answer, as he came up with a design that’s embedded below. While I doubt that Facebook would ever implement a design like this, there are some interesting features including a news feed which shows up like a news ticker at the bottom of the page.

The feed like that is somewhat interesting in that it’s relegated to an area which essentially makes the feed look like “noise”, something that many people are already complaining about. There are also some interesting navigational modifications. Events are also inserted into a calendar within the profile, which in my opinion makes all upcoming events much more manageable.

While the design below is not the one being launched by Facebook, it’s interesting to think about Facebook doing a total design overhaul once again.