Help us test the shiny new "User Activity" page! (Plus a bunch of new features.) [duplicate]

Question

We've launched! Please give feedback here.

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Today, we're shipping the new "Activity Page" of the Profile here on Meta SE, so you can test it out and hopefully share some feedback and suggestions before we ship it network wide. Hate words? Assuming you're signed in, just click your face up in the top bar, and you can see it right now. Or, keep reading...

Quick Background

You may recall that we're breaking the current "profile" page into two views, to address two use cases:

• The "Profile Page" - When you click someone else's user card, by default, you'll see a view designed to give a better overall summary of who they are: Their location, their "About me," what tech/tags they're most active in, their top posts, etc. This page has been live on MSE for a while, and you've given us a ton of great feedback, most of which is already live.

• The "Activity Page" - When you click on your own user card, you should see a page emphasizing your actual activity - what you've done, how big an impact you've had helping others, and what you can go do next, if you're so inclined.

Note that both pages will still be visible to everyone (although some fields aren't, for obvious reasons). So, you can look at other users' "Activity" page, and your own "Profile", that's just not the tab that'll be displayed by default.

The Old Activity Page

Let's think about when you're looking at your own page, and start with what the old page (still live on the rest of the network) was good at. Here's the bottom of the page:

It's efficient, and evolved over time, based on what power users told us they needed.

So, let's change it for change's sake! New Things are SHINY, and lead to a brighter - if poorly thought out and short lived - future! Huh. That's actually a pretty awful idea. So, let's leave the content, and pretty much everything else down there exactly how it was, and not mess up anyone's workflow. With the exception of some minor styling tweaks, the actual activity section you interact with today - both the content and the layout - is unchanged.

Now, lets take a look at the top of the page. Remember that the top part doesn't change when you drill down to different activity tabs; it's always there. Again, think of the case where you're looking at your own profile:

So, personally, I'm not that frequently going to my profile to, say... double check what my name is. Or confirm what city I live in. Or see if my age has changed. (Actually, the last one may feel like a waste most days, but ~0.3% of the time, it reminds me it's my birthday - YAY!)

Now, the point isn't that this was dumb design; it wasn't. When the page had to serve both use cases, this info made sense, but when you're looking at your own profile, there's no reason to always be showing you a bunch of things that A) you know and can't realistically forget, B) almost never change, and C) only do get changed by you.

So, we've replaced them, with a new section designed to better summarize your overall activity and contributions. And we've tossed some totally new features in, too.

The New Activity Page (aka "Top Boxes")

The basic goals were:

1. Don't mess up the bottom part that's working, or make the top part any bigger
2. Replace static, known personal data with dynamic, big-picture summaries of users' contributions
3. Do more to help users track their contributions beyond rep and badge counts (more prominent stats on edits, flags, votes, and the new "People Reached" stat.
4. Show users at all levels "what they can do next" and help more new ones learn the ropes gradually
5. Address power-users needs better

I'm not going to walk through all the changes. I'd rather let you go touch it and share your thoughts, but here are a couple of features worth highlighting:

"Progress to next badge" bar automatically selects the badge you're closest to earning (or that's most logical to go for next), and tracks your progress toward earning it. It also helps walk new users through a slightly more guided intro, nudging them to read the "About" page, etc. For most badges, it not only explains how to earn 'em, but also links to a (mostly) logical place to go try to do so:

Progress to next privilege better conveys an attainable milestone, so users have a target to work toward that's a little less daunting than "catch Skeet". And it adapts for our most valuable users, too. Once you have earned all the privileges, you should first and foremost take a pause to celebrate how many frigging people you helped. (The "People Reached" stat is a nice rough estimate). Have a drink, maybe. But after that, we want you to be able to track goals, too, so the "next privilege" bar automatically switches to tracking your progress toward your closest tag badge. Plus, you can change it if you want to pick a different one (like this poor soul might want to do):

The broader context:

As of now, both pages are live here on Meta, so you can try out how they work together. We're rolling out a couple of new features on the "Profile" side as well:

• Dedicated fields to share your OSS projects or online presence (Dedicated fields for Github, Twitter, etc.) and new fields in the edit page for them. Note that they're totally optional, and leaving them out won't leave weird blank entries.
• New "Hide a community" from my profile feature, (found on the "Edit & Settings" tab.) This came from community feedback, and helps users who may not want their SO Profile - which their boss might stumble upon - to prominently feature their top questions from, oh, I dunno...The Workplace, say. (It's not a true privacy setting, as the connection between accounts can be made with some work, like through the API, but it lets you control what sites are or are not featured on your profile page.)

Note: If you can, please post any suggestions or feedback on the changes to the "Edit/Settings" or the "Profile" page (the one others see) as a new post here on MSE. Ideally, we want to keep the answers here on this post focused on the activity side ("Top Boxes"), since that bit's brand new, and we want to see what suggestions there are important to the most people.

We LOVE it. But, as Joel keeps telling me, no one cares what I think.

We want to know what you think. Go touch it. Play with it. Tell us what you like (seriously). More importantly, what tweaks or adjustments should we make before we ship it network wide? Anything missing that you use all the time?

There are some places where we know we want to make some changes, but we wanted to wait for feedback to determine what approach makes the most sense. (For example, we're fairly sure more tooltips are needed, but having them everywhere makes a mess, so we did them for the most obvious places, but waited for your feedback before adding more, to see where they may be needed most.)

As always, thanks in advance for your feedback - it always helps us ship something better than whatever we started with.

Answer 1

status-completed

That's great you added new fancy tooltips (can be seen when hovering some stat in the "Impact box"). But the standard tooltips still appear, so they overlap the new ones (however my screenshot doesn't reflect it as it was taken from mobile).

So I propose that the standard ones shouldn't be shown when the new ones work (which would happen if there is something wrong with loading javascript or you just disabled it).

Answer 2

The Top tags section looks pretty messy to me.

I presume these little coloured circles refer to some kind of badges, but something about the nesting and changing numbers of labels on each level is confusing to my eye.

I'd prefer a nested scrolly-table myself.

Answer 3

On Samsung Galaxy S5 in Chrome, I am seeing that when I click to choose a badge to track, the background is not fully darkened, there is white space on the right.

Answer 4

status-completed Fixed, it will be live after our next production build.

The following applies to

• OS: Windows 8.1
• Browser: Chrome 41, IE 11, Firefox 34

For some reason, the labels on the y-axis of the reputation graph are out of alignment with the grey bars on my end.

Looking at a couple of images in this thread (especially those posted in March), it appears that I'm not the only one, though there are others without issues.

I mucked around and found out that using the CSS values

• top: -3px (originally -1px) in .card.rep-card .graph-col .values
• margin-top: 3px (originally 7px) in .card.rep-card .graph-col .values li

seems to fix the alignment on my end.

Answer 5

Number of days connected should be on the activity page. It changes every day, and I want to see it.

In fact, it's currently the main reason why I go to my profile page (I'm trying to get the Enthusiast badge). I know — I can set the next badge to Enthusiast. But still, I think this info should be on the Activity page. It's mostly useful to me, not to a random visitor to my profile. And if they're actually curious about this, they also probably are about the rest of my activity anyway.

Answer 6

Badges look strange on mobile (Nexus 5, Chrome, default settings)

Answer 7

The 'Votes' button is on the next line:

I now no longer have '20' next to reputation, so it's "fixed".

Firefox 36.0.1 on Linux; also observed in WebKit.

Answer 8

After clicking on 'choose what badge to track':

The content seems too large for the dialog? I'm also not sure about the location of the 'Search for a badge'-field? Shouldn't that be next to the buttons?

Firefox 36.0.1 on Linux; also observed in WebKit.

Answer 9

Three-digit rep gains are misaligned in the mobile profile page and the upvotes are black (which was recently fixed for the desktop version of this profile page):

Answer 10

status-completed - thanks for reporting. With you in the next build.

This seem minor, but inconsistent: <rep> Rep. would look better than <rep> req., even if it is just to match up with the "tooltip":

The unit-of-measure is not "required", but "reputation".

Answer 11

status-completed

I get a 404 - Not found when I click on posts edited in my profile.

The link points to https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/133638/jehof?tab=activities&sort=revisions

Answer 12

Really, who thought that the number of your recent names is clickable?

Yes, I know that it was clickable also in the old design, but it's time to fix it.

1. Style it like link

2. Even better, make the whole phrase clickable

Answer 13

The mini-reputation graph tooltip is showing decimals.

Since reputation is always a whole number (and all of the numbers display .00 anyway) it should only display whole numbers. This seems to be new behavior.

(Windows 7 Enterprise, Internet Explorer 9 (9.0.8112.16421))

Answer 14

It appears that there are a few bugs to work out, but still leaves me wondering when you are going to roll this out to other sites on the network?

• Are you going to release a site (or sites) at a time, or one big roll out for all of StackLand?

• If you are going to roll out a couple of sites at a time, might I suggest a few

  • Anime and Manga
  • Code Review
  • Computer Science
  • Chemistry
  • Japanese
  • Cryptography
  • Blender
  • English Language Learners
  • Music

  Give us a little something to hold us over until we get our full-fledged site design, unless doing so will push us further back on the site graduation roll out

  NOTE: These are beta sites that have graduated but are waiting on site design and to have the new privilege levels turned on.

• What does the timeline look like for this change to spread over StackLand?

Answer 15

status-declined - not everyone wants to click in order to get the information. Agreed this isn't giving all the information some of the time, but it is useful to have directly in front of people.

I would get rid of the information display next to the privilege and badge progress bars:

While they may relay the correct information in some instances - particularly when there is only a single requirement to satisfy, other instances will not be accurate in terms of this information. For example, as displayed above, the Electorate gold badge has a dual requirement in terms of the

1. total number of votes on questions; and
2. the proportion of votes on questions.

Other question may have more complex requirements. And in any these more complex cases, which one would be chosen to represent the visible requirement. Hence the suggestion to just get rid of it - free up the space perhaps for something else (or less-is-more).

The on-click display shows all the requirements necessary.

Related suggestion: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/250052/168244

Answer 16

status-bydesign - this will be different on each site.

Please add borders around the scores of accepted q&a, as it is done with the scores of non-accepted ones, for consistence and to make those scores of accepted answers not look visually smaller, at least for me, than the scores of non-accepted (because they have quite light background)

Answer 17

In the IMPACT box on my Activity page, it says that I have "2 posts edited". But when you go to my activities/revisions, you will see that I have 5 total edits.

OK, so the 3 earliest edits are to my own posts, and I realize that the system is excluding edits to my own posts. But my other 2 edits are to the same post, so it's not accurate to say "2 posts edited". It should say "1 post edited" or "2 edits" or "2 total edits".

Answer 18

status-declined - there is no pointer indicator here, so there is nothing to suggest it is clickable. This doesn't seem to be a problem for most people.

Urge to click

Empty white box made me click it, as if doing so will switch it to green.

Answer 19

I'm not sure if this relates to the new layout but bugs me now I can see it...

Other than the whitespace being odd, generally around the text and image, the 'Network Profile' baseline is 1px lower than the username baseline.

Answer 20

On click reputation graph reloads full page

I noticed that reputation graph can be clicked. So I did, page reloaded and something happened. After a few clicks I noticed that it is actually switching to reputation tab on lower pane.

It should not reload a full new page. As full page reloads user can not notice what is actually changed on the page. Only the reputation tab in lower pane should be reloaded and highlighted.

Answer 21

Badge elements and alignment is marginally off on mobile:

As specific reference, in the above:

1. Gold, Silver and Bronze badges could/should fill to the width of the other boxed content;

2. Little badge circles don't line up with the numbers the way they do with the Informed badge.

3. The Illuminator badge height is different from that of Informed.

Answer 22

Low privilege requirements seem fine on mobile:

However, anything requiring 10,000+ rep is misaligned:

Also don't know why the badge dot is suddenly showing.

Answer 23

status-declined - this graph is not meant to be a fully featured reputation history graph.

Maybe you would consider showing the mini-tiny-cute graph since the moment when I created my account there, or make it scrollable? I am sure that I started from 101 rep, not from 2.7k.

Answer 24

Any reason that text is in a big box? And what's with all the empty space?

Answer 25

status-declined - these are links that the user put in themselves as part of their "About Me". And we will not default these or any other links to open in a new tab. Because we like to keep our users in control of their browsers. That's why middle/wheel clicks exist.

Following all 3 links should open in new tab instead of same tab :

[ Twitter ] - [ Steam ] - [ Amazon Wishlist ]

It would be more cool and suitable if above links open in new tab when user click. So user can be on profile after click also.

Answer 26

I don't know if you have noticed but there is a ridiculous amount of white space that totally wastes my monitor size.

Answer 27

This UI is a min-maxer's paradise. Which may or may not be what you want.

Of course, I went straight to try to earn the next badge, "Critic", by randomly downvoting the question, and when that didn't get me a badge, downvoting the first answer to it. Well, shucks, I still don't have the badge, and it won't let me downvote comments. So is it broken, or what? Where's my shiny badge?

I'm decently sure that inspiring people to game the system like this isn't the point, but it's what this interface does. That's probably a bad thing.

And I didn't get my badge even after following the instructions, so that seems broken, or you need to explain in the UI that there may be a delay in getting the badge, or whatever. At the moment, it feels wonky and nonfunctional if I do what it tells me, but get no confirmation or payoff.

[Edit: badge has arrived, but it's not letting me undo my downvotes. That wasn't explained, it just told me I had to do it to get a badge. Yeah, new UI seems bad for encouraging system-gaming without also showing the more complex issues.]

[Edit2: this response was because testing something involves finding the ways in which it might break or be exploited. Whether I'm wearing the hat of programmer, security consultant, QA tech or usability tester, the first thing to ask is "what are the failure modes?" - the two points above leaped out at me, as UX issues. I'm interpreting downvotes as "other people performing the same test" rather than "people annoyed that I tested the ways in which this new UI might break" - however, it'd be good to post a comment or answer indicating whether your experience was similar and how it compared: more data points always better.]