Some changes to the profile while we make it responsive

Question

Update 1

I’ve restored the profile age to all and fixed a few bugs y’all reported. I’ll be addressing individual answers as best as I can.

Original post

On our way to a fully responsive Stack Overflow, we just shipped some changes to the user profile. We won’t be enabling responsiveness just yet, but the top portion will be ready to be squishy.

I hope these changes are low impact on our way to a fully responsive profile. Think of this as more a realignment than a redesign.

Some changes that you’ll see immediately:

1. Basic reach-related stats moved to underneath the avatar near reputation.
2. Various links and other stats are now under the display name and some stats behind are only viewable by you or a moderator.
3. We got rid of the “Apparently, this user prefers to keep an air of mystery about them”, instead showing no biography. If it’s your profile and you don’t have a biography, we show a call to action to add one.
4. We’ve added an Edit profile button under the avatar if you’re a moderator or you’re viewing your own profile.
5. Biographies now have way more room horizontally, but we still cap to vertical scrolling.
6. The consecutive visit calendar UI has gone away. This is some super legacy UI that isn’t remotely mobile-friendly. The statistic will continue to be displayed for badge-earning purposes, but I think it’s a potentially toxic metric.
7. Dropped the profile views metric entirely. It’s a vanity metric and we don’t think it’s worth keeping around.

Before

After

Answer 1

bug status-completed

"Edit Profile" does not work on meta sites and instead directs the user to their meta activity tab.

Answer 2

bug

The profile picture is not being properly sized.

Previously, all profile pictures had fixed width and height.

See my profile. Just for reference:

^{I should note that the picture was taken from Unsplash.}

Answer 3

I really love to see you put the effort into making these pages responsive. Kudos to you, Aaron!

I have some comments, though. As you can see here, I pulled up the live version (on the left) and a copy from the internet archive on the right, both in an incognito screen.

With your change you introduced some extra rows of white spacing at the top, and I would rather see that gone. SE already uses way too few of its real estate for actual information (yes, I'm looking at you, review pages).

Also, the profile image became bigger. In the old case, it felt more balanced than it does now, and I would love to see it shrink a bit again.

At the same time (I was digging in the CSS, yes blame me for that) I see you introduced a rather large bottom margin on the user card, so that there now is a rather large gap between class="profile-avatar d-flex fd-column ai-center s-card bar-md p12" and class="row d-flex gs24" (the bit with your profile picture and the bit with your communities). The top part has a bottom margin set of 48 pixels. Could you reduce that to something less, like 16 or so?

Answer 4

By grouping reputation, reached, answers and questions on the left of the profile page, the reputation isn't highlighted from these three other metrics anymore, while being more important than those. I would advise to highlight reputation more. (In the previous design, it had this kind of highlight by being separately displayed)

Answer 5

Too much real estate assigned to "about me"

Since this is more of an wiki/forum/etc. than a social network, I don't get why so much space is dedicated to "about me".

When I visit someone's profile I want to see their best answers/questions, expertise tags and such stats. Now I have to scroll a bunch to get there.

In my opinion you would do a great job by simply pushing the "about me" section to the bottom.

Answer 6

Put back "Basic reach-related stats" please

I have got 3 reasons for it:

1. Tell me what is the most important info for an average user: number of answers, questions, reached people or reputation? Sure, the last one! That's why it must be written in large letters and take up all place underneath the avatar. When I want to understand whether a user has proven himself, I don't look at the duration of his/her stay on the site, Iэm interested in reputation. This is the main parameter! Reputation displays the level of being reputable.
2. I mostly use StackOverflow in Russian. One string from new profile hasn't been translated yet: "reached". The thing is that it cannot be translated in one word! Only two words (14 characters totally). Thus the second one will either be moved to the second line (would look awkward), or we'll get a long string that doesn't fit the profile block. When number of reached people had been displayed on the right side of the screen, there had been enough room there for as many words as required.
3. It's been mentioned thousand of times, but it won't prevent from repeating: TOO MUCH EMPTY SPACE ON THE RIGHT!. All the info you pushed underneath the avatar used to be placed on the right! Now it's empty! What's the point of empty space on the screen? Why not put signs (golden/silver/bronze) there in a column? It'd look naturally, would take some place and it woundn't be too difficult to get used to new position. It can be written (as it used to be) in grey color in order not to attract too much attention.

Answer 7

I just remembered that I can easily see "Last seen" for every account someone has (unless that account has been hidden-don't get me started on opt-out versus opt-in) on the network by looking at the "accounts" tab in someone's network profile.

If the reduced granularity there somehow makes it less creepy even though it lets people see where you hang out on the network, why not include that same statistic in someone's profile for a particular site? If you think "last seen" is inherently creepy though, you should fix it everywhere, not just in the place where it's most useful.

Answer 8

feature-request

Aww, I liked the old design better!

It would be nicer if there was a setting to enable the old profile design.

Like this:

Answer 9

Dropped the profile views metric entirely. It’s a vanity metric and we don’t think it’s worth keeping around.

Just pointing out that on the iOS Stack Exchange app, the information still shows:

I know that the iOS app isn't supported anymore, but some features use the Stack Exchange API, so, will this be removed? And if this feature does use the API, is there a way we can query the information?

Answer 10

bug localization

It seems that "answers" (ответы) uses single and incorrect form in terms of localization purposes.

The correct translation should rely on the following forms:

• one / ответ
• two / ответа
• many / ответов

Answers section looks fine.

Related question on ruSO.meta: Не та форма у числа ответов в профиле

At the same time if this entire block purpose is to represent a short form of data from the user activity tab:

Then the "answers" (ответы) is correct form and the "questions" (вопросов) is wrong. So before the fixing we have to decide which type of sentences will be desired in result.

Better (and universal) solution would be to add a context for source strings so each non-English site translation team can choose what to use independently of other localized sites and even main English one.

Answer 11

bug

The badge summary showing badge counts of each colour below the user profile picture does not appear if the user hasn't got at least one badge of each colour.

Answer 12

The borders on everything in the profile page (#d6d9dc) are darker than they are in the activity page (#e4e6e8).

Also, the gray behind the profile picture (#eef0f1) is darker than the gray in the three boxes at the top of the activity page (#fafafb).

Answer 13

feature-request

The Questions, Answers, People Reached, and Reputation are in different places

In the beginning it was:

Profile Picture	Username	X Questions	X Answers	X People Reached
X reputation	About Me	Some detail	Some detail	Some Detail

I took a look at the image above, and I thought the user had 11 questions and 25 answers.

Please correct the layout.

Answer 14

Less useful (or maybe useless) labels on User Profile:

• Staff

  Reason: If Staff inherits from Moderator (Every Staff is a Moderator) and we trust Moderator then the Staff label is no longer needed. They can optionally declare that they are Staff by writing on the description box of the profile page.

• Silver and Bronze

  Reason: Silver and Bronze counting labels are less interesting than the other two labels Reputation Score and Gold labels. I strongly believe other people don't pay much attention to Silver and Bronze labels whenever Reputation Score and Gold labels are displayed.

• Reached

The most useful label that must be restored is Profile Views label from which I can know how many times my profile gets viewed. :-)

Answer 15

I think removing the "last seen" field is a good idea, the previous implementation simply leaks too granular information and allows a sufficiently determined person to track detailed access patterns for a specific user. I also think this fits with the focus on posts and not users that SE sites have, we're not a social network. So I want to encourage you to keep this change and leave this field removed.

The reason some people find this field creepy is that it exposes entirely passive behaviour that people tend to view as private such as simply browsing the site. This kind of information is simply not something that is anyone else's business. Of course it's useful to know if another user has visited the site recently, but that still doesn't mean that everyone is automatically entitled to that information. I used that field myself to check if a user could have seen my reply/comment/whatever, but I still want this field gone because it's actually none of my business. In the end it doesn't actually tell me whether a user has seen my post or comment, and it certainly doesn't entitle me to a response in any case.

The "last seen" is not yet removed from the API, which I think you should certainly do as well. As long as it's still accessible the privacy implications remain.

Removing the calender is a good change in my opinion as well, but doesn't go far enough. You really need to retire the Fanatic and Enthusiast badges as well if you want to remove the "pressure" to log in daily. I have those badges on plenty of sites, but they're really not that fun unless you get them without paying attention. Missing them due to UTC date handling weirdness is just a frustrating experience for something that actually doesn't matter.