Change information hierarchy on Profile Pages to feature user-generated content, not group content

[ebarry]

Context:
Hi everyone, last week i attended a few meetings with Fellows at Public Lab, and found out that they were having difficulties finding or navigating to content they had created, specifically their Project Pages, which are really important wiki pages.

Currently, Profile pages offer blue links to Research Notes and Questions under the map, and a link to wikis in the right sidebar. This seems to not be enough:

Thinking about Profile Pages

I clearly heard from multiple people that they expected to see a page full of content they created, not groups they belong to in which they may have posted content. Their expectations were that a profile page would be more like a gallery, similar to an instagram profile page.

Upon reflections, it seems like our information hierarchy on Profile pages may be off, in the sense that the images shown on profile pages are not of the user's own content, but from activity in a topic. I'd suggest to put links to a user's groups as text, and use images to feature their own content. I suspect this would create additional incentives to post and make a nice looking profile page that people would link to more frequently.

Additional context (optional)

[jywarren]

Hi, this was actually the way the profile pages were redesigned, but we found that cross-tagging of posts caused either repetitive listing of the same post under multiple topics, OR upon fixing that, the omission of some topics the user is participating in because we did not show a post more than once (i.e. once the first topic was shown with a post, the second topic the same post was tagged with was omitted.

This remained unresolved for a while and then shifted to the current model where we show content by the user along the bottom of each topic in the aggregate. Which avoids duplication but isn't great either, and many of the reasons you list above were motivations for the original design.

How to address this hiccup in design? More narrowly stated, in the "show primarily work by the author" model, how do we display a topic for a post that's already been listed once under a different topic? Or can we come up with a different model that avoids this issue?

Thanks!

[ebarry]

Could we use our grid style to showcase cards of notes, questions, comments, and wikis?

Maybe show the topics that someone is active in as a list, rather than using the topic card UI on profile pages.

[ebarry]

Offering a vision for discussion:
our profile pages should feature people's work in card or gallery format, similar to a profile page in instagram.

Reference:

• our "Card" style: (scroll down to see on this slide) https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-XHlVn3KQxSjS5WzHgc1l1qvFwqUC5f3-7GXugUP9u4/edit#slide=id.g5926e39f86_0_116
• our "Gallery Of Items" style: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-XHlVn3KQxSjS5WzHgc1l1qvFwqUC5f3-7GXugUP9u4/edit#slide=id.p

[jywarren]

Hi Liz - As a proposed solution (other than using topic cards to show only contributions by the profile author) using a grid of post/page/question cards -- the bottom of the three options shown here:

could work but it would need at least 2 modifications:

1. showing what topic the content has been posted into
2. figuring out how to either show all notes, wikis, and questions mixed together, OR incorporating tabs as on tag pages like https://publiclab.org/tag/water-quality -- like this:

I think there are pros and cons to this, and one thing I'd like to hear from you and staff on as well, is "how well are site topic communities grouping?" -- bearing in mind the big transition in site organization in ~2018 when cards and style guide were introduced was to make PublicLab.org seem like a collection of topically focused sub-communities or forums. That's once reason we emphasized topic cards as much as possible, including in the profile page, rather than mixing content together (here both mixing topics and mixing types).

For reference (not saying it's my favorite - it seems OK although I rarely use this page) GitHub profiles show the following:

Note: they kind of de-emphasize individual items in favor of showing which projects you were active in, but they do kind of mix them together too.

If the changes i outlined above in 1 and 2 make sense and work for you, we can go with a grid-based approach and I can start outlining what additional design is needed and what steps are next.

[bhamster07]

I like the ideas @jywarren proposes under items 1 and 2 above! One thing I might suggest adding to a display of a user's notes/questions/wikis is comments. Some people contribute a lot and exclusively through comments.

A couple other stray thoughts about the information hierarchy:

The profile page seems like the place on Public Lab where I might expect emphasis on an individual’s contributions, more than happenings in a broader topic community. On the Research team, we’re going to increase efforts to attract new contributors, and I think it’d be a selling point that users could have a profile page that prominently features their contributions as part of a recognition model.

That said, a profile page that displays both individual work and group work could be neat? This profile page from Just One Giant Lab (https://app.jogl.io/user/8) has a bio, a feed, and a “portfolio” which implies someone building up a body of work. The portfolio lists projects and groups that this user has contributed to, similar to GitHub profiles. The JOGL profile doesn’t have a “gallery” of individual work, though, rather it’s a feed of recent activity (like a FB wall or whatever it’s called now 😅).

[nawed2611]

Hey, Can I work on this issue?