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

Nitpicky, but there's inconsistent capitalization in the tabs at the top (some mod-only):

Specifically "Edit profile & Settings", "Account info", "mod", and "Network profile". I think the standard elsewhere on the site is to do all lowercase for tabs, but if we want to keep the capitalization here then "Profile" (both places), "Info" and "Mod" should be capitalized IMO.

Answer 2

My recommended "Next Badge" is Excavator, which I guess I am "close" to earning in some absolute sense, but it is not really useful to show "progress" in a badge that I only need to take one action to earn. I would suggest instead recommending the badge with the greatest percentage of progress.

Answer 3

status-completed - with you in the next build.

When I click Track the next one after having completed a badge, I get the message:

Unable to load popup - please try again

The following error shows up in the console:

https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/activity/badge-card/next-badge-popup?userId=209031&_=1424710363634
Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (Not Found)

GET https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/activity/badge-card/next-badge-popup?userId=209031&_=1424710659111 404 (Not Found)

Answer 4

status-declined - the tooltip doesn't stop the mouse from moving and fades out when the mouse moves out of the graph. I don't see the problem a delays is supposed to solve.

Please delay showing the tooltip in the graph

The tooltip shouldn't appear when my cursor is merely passing through. I think something like

on mouseover
    wait 100ms || 500ms
    if still mouseover
        show tooltip

should be used. Note also the mouseout event isn't always captured when this happens, leaving the tooltip there until the mouse returns.

Answer 5

status-declined - this page is about recent activities, not about what you want others to see (that's for the profile page).

1) I like that I can choose my next badge. Can we also get a similar ability to choose which of our badges we want to display either on the Top Badges section, or the new Badges box on the Activity section?

status-deferred - we like this, just need to find a good way to implement it.

2) Can the badge boxes be clickable and take me to a filtered list of my badges? I was wondering what were my 3 gold badges, and my first instinct was to click on the box to see them.

status-deferred - this has come up already when we got feedback for the profile page. We are still looking at a good way to represent all the wanted information there in a good way.

3) On the Top Network Posts, can we get a border or something around the reputation number so it doesn't look like it's part of the title?

Overall though, I think I like it. Nice job with it! :)

Answer 6

status-completed

There is no page title when in "My Logins" or "Hide Communities" sections of "Edit profile and settings", it's just showing the raw URL as the title. (it's fine in all other sections)

Answer 7

I vote to change the helpful flags line to something around "No flags yet" if the user hasn't flagged anything. It makes it look like I have done things, but none were useful.

Answer 8

status-completed - with you in the next build

Halp! Upvotes are black instead of green! Love new borders btw.

Answer 9

I like the "People Reached" addition; makes me feel useful and warm inside. But the tooltip only tells me that it counts view on my questions and my highly ranked answers. What constitutes a highly ranked answer? Is is based on number of votes (if so, how is that scaled between large and small SE sites?)? Is it only answers where mine is either accepted or highest voted?

Perhaps the tooltip can be updated to clarify what "highly ranked" means. Or, and this might be good to, if you already know which answers are highly ranked to count their views, maybe the people reached indicator could link to all of the posts it includes (or at least the answers, since it counts all of the questions and those can be found on the questions page). That way any visitors can see your top contributions in one list, you could check up on the number of views; really it's just giving us more information (knowledge is power).

Answer 10

Could we get a placeholder or tooltip to indicate what types of links are required for the Profile Web Presence settings

When I went to add my Stack Overflow Careers Page, I got the following error:

Oops! There was a problem updating your profile:

• The Stack Overflow Careers link or username entered does not appear to be a valid Stack Overflow Careers link or username.

I tried the following links before it finally working on the third.

• https://careers.stackoverflow.com/users/info/266832
• https://careers.stackoverflow.com/cv/edit/160667
• https://careers.stackoverflow.com/kylemit

The issue is that most people when they click on their profile are going to be taken to one of the first two links first when they're signed in. It might not be obvious to use the bottom link, even though it's the only one of the three that's publically accessible.

Answer 11

That's a pity that I can't track tag badge progress before reaching the last privilege (in other words, before 20k).

Can I have an ability to choose between tracking a privilege and tracking the progress towards the tag badge, which is much more important and interesting for me?

Answer 12

status-deferred - we would love to do this, but there are so many things happening with these pages right now, that it would take some time to get to, possibly in a future iteration of the pages.

I only do minimal FOSS contributions to Github. My main FOSS projects are all hosted on BitBucket.

I would very much like a dedicated field for BitBucket, but doing so will inadvertently result in everyone asking for a field for their favorite FOSS repository.

So, rather than overloading the Edit Profile page with an endless list of FOSS repository hosting services, what if the "Web Presence" part is built like Google+'s "Links" portion of the Profile>About page? It's a 3-part 'card' containing:

1. Profiles -- links to one's profile page on various websites.
2. Contributor to -- links to one's works: articles, FOSS projects, whathaveyou
3. Links / Others -- sites not falling into categories (1) or (2) above

Each category starts out empty; clicking on an ajax-powered "Add link" linky adds a new field where one can simply type the name of a link, and the link proper.

Answer 13

status-completed - we have done a bunch of work on mobile views for these pages. We dropped some features that exist in the non-mobile views (to save bandwidth, for mobile aesthetics and mobile UX).

Desperately needs phone-friendliness!

This is what my Activity page looks like on my phone (all screenshots are from Chrome on Android; first two at default zoom):

That's not very readable. (These uploaded images are large even after I shrunk the captured images; imagine on a phone.) For comparison, here's what my profile page on another site looks like:

Ah, much better -- I can read that.

The new Profile page has the same problem as the new Activity page -- it's trying to scale the whole thing to my 4.8" screen. When you rolled out the new profile I assumed that was temporary and that a mobile view would be coming, but it sounds like you're getting ready to roll this out and I don't see that yet.

Also, the layout on the reputation tab on my phone is a little wonky (but is ok in a full-size browser):

Answer 14

status-deferred

That "Select your next badge" window is nice and encourages badge-hunting very well :-)

Three improvements I'd like to see:

• the edit symbol that brings you to the window does not have a tooltip
• it's not clear whether the "selected" badge is selected forever or just for the current view, and especially whether this selection is publicly visible or not.
• the selection table has progress bars for each badge in the background. I'd also like to see the numbers (that would be shown when selected) directly in the overview, maybe on-hover only: There's a huge difference between 5/10 and 300/600 which is otherwise not apparent before selecting the badge.

Answer 15

status-completed - the color of the "recommended" badge has been updated, but we will not be changing the progress bars at this time.

The Select your next badge pop-up has the text "recommended" positioned at the top-right of the closest to being awarded badge. For me, this is the Inquisitive badge, but I edited the text to "Research Assistant" to show how this text's background is far too close to the badge name text:

I also feel that grey-on-grey action is a bit ugly, too. Perhaps that could also be green to match the ticks on already-unlocked badges?

Actually, the more I look at it the uglier it becomes. Why does the text need to be positioned on top of the progress bar anyway? Why do the progress bars have to be the same colour as the badge they're representing? I feel doing it with a thinner progress bar and displaying the actual badge makes it look so much nicer.

How it currently looks

How I propose it's done instead

Answer 16

I can't find the age of user's anymore. Checked both the Profile and Activity tabs, but not there.

Where did it go?

Answer 17

How often are the badge progress numbers updated? My votes today aren't yet reflected.

Blame it on caching™ is an acceptable answer.

Answer 18

status-completed - No more 0/0 bar now

I didn't earn the Curious badge, because I don't have a positive question record. If I'm not mistaken, this means I will never earn the Curious badge (unless I would delete questions). Yet, it appears as the 'Next badge' in my activity tab.

Also, at first, I didn't get why I didn't have the badge: I have 18/5 and 0/0. The popup isn't very clear in this border case.

Answer 19

status-completed

Is there any way for a user to track progress towards tag badges, before they have maxed out all possible privileges? It's a neat feature, and something I'd be more interested in than the site badge progress.

Maybe it could be something that shows up specifically on the "tags" or "badges" sub-pages.

Answer 20

status-completed

When hovering over the reputation graph, the tooltip that shows the exact reputation number is very far top and left of the actual graph. So much so, that it goes above my window screen when hovering around like the middle point of the graph, and goes even further above the farther right I go.

Does this when using either IE or firefox (latest vers) on windows 8.1

Answer 21

status-declined - the avatar is bigger now.

That's great that avatar is clickable! I didn't notice it at first. Can the name be made clickable too please?

Answer 22

status-declined - for performance reasons we will not be doing this.

I would like a link to a users chat profile for that specific site.

This will show the chat rooms he/she is in and you will be able to invite a user to a private chat room.

Answer 23

status-declined - the suggested design is much too busy. We did try to design something like this in early on, but decided against it.

The "Badges" should contain all the badges information you show -- the 'next tag badge' in the "Reputation" section to its left should be in here --- and you could show much more information.

If it's something I'm going to look at regularly, I would soon be wanting to see much more of the information I could be getting (and care about). I suggest something more like:

... thus showing the next tag badge info in the "badges" section, the newest of each badge color (though the most recent 2 badges would be a decent alternative), and the mouseover text replaces the redundant color information with how many of those badges are tag badges.

This is quite deliberately busier, since the "clean" look -- while it is nice for locating the information the first time you look at it, quickly becomes "bare" looking as you get used to it.

That will free up space in the 'reputation' section for other data (I suggest weekly/monthly/quarterly reputation, but there are other fine choices)

Answer 24

status-completed

The avatar preview when editing profile is too small; enlarge this preview please to the size it was earlier?

Answer 25

In IE11 (yes, I know) the icon on Privileges to show that you're about to follow an external link (?) is chopped off at the bottom. In Chrome this icon is complete.

Minor thingy... and I just checked: I'm not zoomed in/out.

Answer 26

status-completed

The impact box, seems to be missing a space between the number of flags and the words "helpful flags". Also, given the example has the same order of magnitude for helpful flags and votes cast, shouldn't the digits line up.

Screenshot is from Mac running Firefox 36.

Answer 27

status-completed - turns out there was a profile image handling change yesterday, unrelated to the changes for the Activity page, which broke the page for users who uploaded a profile picture.

When trying to save the changes in the new Edit Profile & Settings tab I got the error Invalid image type. I only added a link to my GitHub profile before clicking the save profile button.

Answer 28

status-declined - Having an edit icon suggests to people that this is something that can be changed. Removing it means that's not longer the case and the feature would become much less discoverable.

I feel the 'Select your next badge' functionality should be accessed from a single-click on the progress bar, and the badge information (currently single-click) should be mouseover text like on the Recently Earned badge.

This would also mean that the 'Edit' Icon can disappear entirely, meaning we wouldn't have two of the same icon for two different things within 50 pixels of each other: The 'posts edited' icon has now been changed

I would suggest:

• Remove the 'Edit Next Badge' button entirely
• Make clicking on the progress take you to the 'Select your Next badge' screen.
• Remove the current 'single click' popup entirely
  • We already have the X/X badge progress above the progress bar
  • Make the tooltip/mouseover text the badge description

Answer 29

status-completed - with you in the next build

Per this request the color of accept background is the new light green. But accepts now look very ill:

Please leave everything consistent, as in the request I mentioned, but change new light green to old good dark green, which is still used, for example, on SO:

Answer 30

Or see if my age has changed. (Actually, the last one feels may feel like a waste most days, but ~0.3% of the time, it reminds me it's my birthday - YAY!)

Not to be the bearer of bad news, but I fear you may forget your birthday with the new profile version, as age seems to have been removed.

Was the removal intentional? I don't want to forget my birthday now too.