The News Feed redesign is intended to help you keep up with people that matter to you, regardless of how often you visit the site, according to Mark Tonkelowitz, an engineering manager at Facebook. It's heavily influenced by the new "smart lists" introduced last week, as the redesigned news feed "predicts" which stories will be important to you, and displays these first.

Facebook users, who are notorious for aversion to change, are already , calling this redesign everything from "unnecessary" to "far too complicated."

Here's what you need to know about the new News Feed and ticker, how best to navigate them and whether the new changes influence your current privacy settings.

1. What You See Depends on How Often You Visit

Before yesterday's changes, when you logged into Facebook you could toggle between two views of your News Feed: Top News and Most Recent. Yesterday, Facebook combined these two in a single News Feed. Now, what you see when you first log in depends on how frequently you log in.