Wow, that took longer than expected (though right around the 6-8 week mark), but we finally have a semi-working prototype of the new profile page.
Recap
There’s a longer explanation on part 1 but the gist of it is this: we’re splitting the profile into two pages:
An “About Me” page which is what other people see when they look at your profile. It highlights your best stuff in a way that lets users quickly get a sense of who you are and what your interests are. For any deeper dives, you can switch over to the “Dashboard” view which houses everything else.
A “Dashboard” page which is what you see when you go to your profile from the topbar. It highlights the stuff you need to get to fast, and hides the stuff you don’t care about (your “about me” section, your Twitter profile, etc.). For now, it is just the existing view but we’ll work on this part next.
This part is just focused on the new “About Me” page.
The New Stuff
The prototype is only working on Stack Overflow so far, but you can try just about any profile by going to https://stackoverflow.com/users/reloaded/{id}
(note: SO-only for now, must be logged in). Here are some handy examples:
EDIT: The historical reloaded page is no longer visible, but it looked something like this:
We made lots of little changes based on your feedback, but the two biggest changes are the Tags and Badges sections.
Tags
The tags section now gives a very basic visualization of where a user does most of their posting. The section shows between 6 and 9 tags for each user, and the size is based on the percentage of posts a user has in that tag. It's easiest to just look at some examples here:
- Eric Lippert - one primary tag, six small tags
- Jon Skeet - one large, two medium, three small tags
- Adam Katz - four medium, three small
- Sajad Lfc - six small
The exact rules for how the sizing is done are still in flux, so if you notice a profile that seems off, just let us know and we'll see if we can tweak the rules.
Badges
After the last proposal was met with at worst confusion and at best a lot of "meh", we went back to the drawing board on the badges section. We were deeply inspired by this image:
We decided we wanted to focus on two things:
Your most impressive badges, so they don't get lost in a pile of more common badges. If you're one of ~500 users who has earned the Generalist badge on SO, you darn well deserve to show it off.
A visual representation of just how many badges you've earned. At some point, 1500 bronze badges becomes just another number, and it's hard to wrap your head around the sheer quantity. So we wanted to show the number visually. For new users, we wanted to feel a sense of accomplishment every time a new one shows up, and for top users, we wanted to show just how ridiculously many badges they have.
So here's the result:
- Gheorghe Bulicanu - a newish user
- Nerdess - a 1k user
- SLaks - a top user
The "Notable" section at the top lists your rarest badges, based on the number awarded on that site. The "Totals" section visualizes how many you have, and scales with your badge count. It also shows gold, silver, and bronze as different sizes to emphasize those rarer badges.
Other changes
We've made lots of other changes, but just a few I'll call out:
- The "About Me" section is easier to read, fits more, and hides less.
- Tags and Badges now use standard site styles
- The "Top Posts" section allows you to sort by newest
- The "Top Posts" section no longer shows badges, since it was too confusing
- Meta activity has been added to the sidebar (it’s just a placeholder right now -- we know it doesn’t work!)
Other notes that were common questions / requests:
- The current job and link to Careers profile are hidden for now, since they'll be optional anyway. We'll bring them back in a future version.
- The "Apps and Projects" section will be available on all sites (probably just called "Projects"). And yes, we know this section is just an image right now -- we'll get around to implementing it soon.
- Nothing that appears only to you on your profile, or to a moderator is implemented yet. This is just the “viewing somebody else’s profile” view.
Feedback
We know there are still bugs, so we’re looking more for big-picture feedback than minor bug reports. We’re still actively building the page, but wanted to get the early prototype out for feedback sooner rather than later. Let us know what you think!