Sneak Peek at New User Profile page
LiveJournal is "improving" the design of the profile page (formerly userinfo)
lj_design is previewing the new design -- you can see what it looks like by appending ?ver=ng to the URL for your own (or any other) profile page.
Then, read the comments and/or add remarks of your own.
It's still beta; looks like you need to append &mode=full to see more than ( Read more... )
lj_design is previewing the new design -- you can see what it looks like by appending ?ver=ng to the URL for your own (or any other) profile page.
Then, read the comments and/or add remarks of your own.
It's still beta; looks like you need to append &mode=full to see more than ( Read more... )
I'm curious. What kind of research did you find on how people use the profile pages and what people want out of it?
When I'm looking at somebody else's profile page, I'm trying to get a sense of who they are as a person (or in the case of a community, what it's about).
Despite the famous quote "Tell me whom you love and I will tell you who you are", I'm far more interested in somebody's biography and interests than who their friends are. Yet that's the information that's hardest to see in this new version!
Under the current design, community guidelines are "above-the-fold" -- visible on the first screen without scrolling. Now, you can't even see them without scrolling and are so narrow they're hard to read.
Others have already mentioned hp100 and pornish_pixies. Contrast those info pages with the new ones: hp100 and pornish_pixies. Much less useful, burying the warnings and guidelines.
Likewise, I use painless_j's page as a portal to various story collections. Almost impossible under the new version.
Oh, and journal title needs to be more prominent. If someone's trying to decide whether to friend me, my username is less important than the fact that I do much more writing on riba_rambles and my LJ is primarily *my* reading list. By making that my title, it's quite visible on my current user profile but has been buried in the new and I see no way of raising that higher.
The current version shows all my friends, whom I read, together: users, communities, feeds.
The new version splits them up all over the place, making it more difficult to even get a sense of the person in that way.
People have already mentioned the 150 friends limit.
Flaw #1 is that even if the onscreen display is limited, it doesn't show the true number (as current versions do)
Flaw #2 is that when there are more friends, it doesn't show the ellipses (...) to indicate more friends exist.
I did figure out that &mode=full will show more friends, but even that's not perfect. [For example, what the heck's wrong with ginmar's new profile, which is missing most of the data!?!]
Another flaw in the friends list:
Currently, deleted/suspended accounts one still has friended are indicated by a strikethru.
That's missing from the new version; no differentiation between current and dead accounts.
And, as others have already pointed out, which communities I watch is more important than which communities I am a member of. My reader list includes many informational communities which I follow but cannot post. That says far more about my interests than the fact I might've joined a community and later gave up on it, or joined in order to make a one-time announcement. [Also noticed, my current full profile indicates which communities I have posting access to, a distinction that's totally lost in the new UI.
Like I said, I'd love to hear the results of your research on how people use the profile pages and what people want out of them. You've got a lot of visually and technically proficient people in your userbase. Perhaps you should share that and see what we can come up with.
In the meantime, don't change what isn't broken. I don't know what problems you thought you were solving with this new UI, but they aren't the kinds of fixes your userbase want.
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Not only is the current version annoying to read, but it's just a complete mess if you have sight imparities and use a screenreader.
I hadn't even thought of that, but excellent point.
For users with screenreaders, the most important text (the bio or community guidelines) comes *after* a whole mess of irrelevant info (friendslist/watchers).
Currently, someone using a screenreader can pick up the bio and stop reading when it gets to the list of friends.
You can simulate it for yourself by using a text-only browser. I tried viewing my own profile (both versions) in Lynx. Currently, there are 93 words before my bio begins, including my title. In the new version, 431 words, including many usernames that a screenreader would probably have to spell out.
No! No! NO!
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