I first noticed this when viewing my Network Profile, but it's also visible on my profile at any site.
My Top Questions are at the top of the page, prominent, easy to read with plenty of white space, tags visible, and so on. They just plain stand out (besides being the first thing you see when you hit the page). However, if you scroll down to Top Answers, it's almost like an afterthought. You don't see tags, when it was last posted/edited, and you only see the question that the answer was posted in.
This seems backwards, given the nature of the sites. It's not so much about the questions as it is about the answers you give. Yet on the Network Profile, and even on the profiles on individual sites, questions are toward the top of the page and are displayed in a way that makes them stand out a whole lot more.
Edits, in response to Jeff's post.
First of all, Jeff, if you and the team are interested in some wireframe type mock-ups of how you can address the concerns I have with the current presentation of the profiles, I'd be more than happy to whip some up. I've got nothing better to do with my time at the moment - just let me know.
It's not a big deal, since the best users (in my experience) tend to have a limited # of questions and lots of answers.
That's true. My ratio is definitely answer-heavy across my most-used sites. On Stack Overflow, it's currently 634 answers to 277 questions (about 70% of my posts are answers). On Software Engineering, it's much greater at 80 answers for 2 questions (98% of my posts are answers). However, that's not really the point.
The questions take up a lot of room the way they are currently displayed. Even with pagination, the answers don't begin until almost 2/3 of the way down the page.
Therefore, on the profile of the best users although you may see questions first, the natural "weight" of the profile is still expressed in a series of numbers...
This isn't displayed on the Network profile page. In fact, I don't see a total "questions" count nor a total "answers" count. Displaying these values, along with a "total posts" count might be a good idea. This should be visible when you hit up the page.
but it seems a bit capricious to change it in one place for such vague reasons.
The reason why it should be changed is based on who is viewing these profiles and what the purpose of the profile is to these top viewers. The profile should exist to demonstrate the credibility of the person posting on the site. There are two main categories of people who I see hitting up either the site profile or the network profile, in most cases.
The first group of people are other users of a Stack Exchange site, registered or non-registered. They might be viewing the profile to see how legit someone is. The About Me is a good thing, but seeing what other answers someone has posted also lends to credibility. In order for a person to learn about your credibility, you want to show off the user's top answers first. You also want to make it fairly evident how respected these answers are (in terms of votes and acceptance).
The second group of people are prospective employers. These are people who find the profile in different ways - they might come from a Google search, be given a link to it in a cover letter or on a resume, come from Stack Overflow Careers, an applicant's personal site, etcetera. I believe these people would want to see what a candidate for a job knows first and foremost. That would best be shown by showing their answers first. Knowing what kinds of answers they provide to questions is very enlightening. Showing questions first does show what kind of things the person is interested in learning, but doesn't reflect on their current state of knowledge in the same way answers do.
