Tuesday, March 30, 2010

New profile pages

Last week we completely revamped our user profile pages and think they're much more useful now for both yourself and those who like to be voyeurs. I've certainly found myself spending a lot more time clicking on people's names than I have in the past.

First off, the layout is completely different. We had an issue we wanted to address where these profile pages looked pretty bad if someone was new to a site or hadn't done much. Now we're bringing in more data and granular activity about each user to minimize this problem.

Second, we've added a lot more data points about each person while still maintaining their anonymity. The one we're most excited about is the data under the "Track Record" section. To give people a better sense of how they're performing, we've introduced the concept of accuracy: looking at people's historical performance for trading in the "right direction." We're then taking this one step further to see the specific categories and tags the person was most accurate on. For example, this person is considered an Inkling expert in Movies, Sports, and Politics:



And doesn't everyone want to know how they're doing compared to the rest of the world? So we now show a bar graph comparing your level of activity vs. everyone else in your site vs. the average activity across all Inkling sites.



We've also introduced the ability to earn badges for doing things in Inkling. Make a certain number of trades? Get a badge! Ask a certain number of questions or make a certain amount of comments? Get a badge. Those are some of the obvious ones but there are others people can earn that will just happen when they happen. :)



Finally, we've imported our activity feed from the homepage to each individual profile to see a stream of items only related to you. Everything from the questions you've participated in to comments you've made and badges you've won.

This is just a start for what we have planned related to profiles and other data-related insights, but hopefully everyone agrees these changes go a long way in making profiles more interesting to view (and more useful for those who care about enhancing what a business knows about its people!)

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