Improving Mobile Profiles

September 30, 2015

ByAigerim ShormanandTony Hsieh, Product Managers

People visit Facebook profiles more than four billion times per day, and we’re continually looking for ways to make profiles the best place for people to curate their online identities and connect with others.

Today, we’re unveiling some new, mobile-friendly features for Facebook profiles. There are three main improvements that will give you more opportunities to express who you are and control the content showcased your profile.

Bring Your Profile to Life

The world has changed since we first introduced profiles in 2004. On News Feed and profiles, we’re seeing people create and view more videos than ever before. Today we’re starting to test the next step in an obvious evolution of profiles: profile videos. Soon, you’ll be able to film a short, looping video clip that will play for anyone who visits your profile. Profile videos will let show a part of yourself you couldn’t before, and add a new dimension to your profile.

We’re not ignoring profile pictures either; we’ve also built some new features that will help you better let your personality shine through your profile picture. When more than 26 million people used our Celebrate Pride filter, it was more apparent than ever that people use their profile picture to show who they are— even if it’s just for a moment in time. Profile pictures are not just static portraits. They represent what’s going in your life right now and what’s important to you, and we want to give people the tools to better express themselves in this way.

As part of that effort, we’ve started to roll out the ability to set a temporary version of your profile picture that reverts back to your previous profile picture at a specified time. Want to support your team in the week leading up to the big game, commemorate a special milestone like a birthday or vacation or show off a great #tbt picture? Now you can create a temporary profile picture specifically for those moments and events. It can be a visual status update to let your friends know what’s going on in your life today, or it can be your statement of solidarity for a cause you feel strongly about.

Improved Profile Controls

You’ve always been able to control who can see the information you showcase on your profile, and now we’re making it easier for you to see what others can view by introducing a new customizable space at the top of your profile. You can curate this space— and convey what you want people to know about you— by changing the visibility of the fields that show up here. You can also fill out the new, one-line ‘Bio’ field: select certain public About fields like work and education details to appear there; and even visually highlight what’s important to you by choosing up to five Featured Photos to be showcased at the top of your profile. While this space is visible to anyone who visits your profile, you have full control of what information appears here.

Design Improvements to Your Mobile Profile

Along with these new profile features, we’ve made some design changes to mobile profile that improve the profile layout and better present information about you and your friends in a more visually engaging way. We’re moving your profile picture and video to literally put you front-and-center on your profile. Profile pictures are now centered, and we’ve made them bigger to give you more real estate to show off what you can do with our new creative tools.

We’ve also made some small changes that will help you learn more about the people you’ve just met and ensure you see the most interesting visual highlights from the friends you already know. People love seeing photos and mutual friends when viewing the profiles of friends or someone they’ve just met, so those are easier to see now on profile. Photos and friends are right at the top, making getting to know someone and seeing the world through your friends’ eyes as easy as scrolling.

We’re starting to test all of these features to a small number of iPhone users in the UK and California, and we’ll be rolling them out to more people soon. We believe these improvements to profile will give people more ways to connect and share with each other, and express themselves in meaningful ways. We can’t wait to see how people use them.