Our current suite of user pages have had a good long run, serving our community since 2010. We’ve been working on upgrading all areas of the site, moving them to new infrastructure, and now it’s time to release the new user pages. They are meant to work well with the new tag and group pages.
Our goals for these pages:
- Create a one-stop location where you can learn more about an author and the topics they cover
- Make it easy to see a user’s latest stories and their most popular story
- Easy access to a user’s comments
- Increase ability to find interesting stories based on what people you respect have recommended
- Make these pages width responsive so they are readable and usable on every device, from desktop to phones
- Make our pages more accessible to people with disabilities and people using assistive technology on the web.
- Remove unused preferences for better clarity
- Move the pages to our current branding to match the story, blog, and front pages
- Integrate them better with other code so that we spend less time on maintenance.
kos’ new page, showing a mix of tags, stories, follows, and followers
How can I see these exciting new pages?
We aren’t removing the old pages yet. The new pages are found at the url of /users/ instead of /user/. Story page, comment links to users, and the drop down navigation will still go to the old pages. Links to users from the tag and group pages will go to the new ones. You can also manually adjust the URL from one to the other.
You can look around easily by visiting the pages for kos or Meteor Blades, and then following other user links from there.
We want your feedback.
As is our practice, all comments will be read, and considered, and amalgamated, and we’ll reflect and tweak the pages as we are able to and as seems appropriate. The best way to give us this feedback if you’d like a change is to tell us about a use case — an activity that you’re trying to do — and why you’re not able to accomplish it as easily. The old pages won’t be removed until the new ones seem to be doing the job well. A good example of effective, persuasive feedback:
When viewing the front page, I miss having the comment counts, because an increase in comments since I last visited tells me I might want to open the story again to read the new comments.
We want you to be able to do the things you want to do, and helping you do them is what makes our team happy. We can’t always do everything you want, but we do try our best. Critical comments can still be kind, and kind comments are more likely to be read directly by the whole team.
Maybe you’d like to see what Gabe Ortiz has read and recommended lately. Click the “Recommends” tab.
But the old pages aren’t broken!
We appreciate the sentiment and the appreciation of our old work, and how solid it’s been. But they’re not broken in the same way your classic 1969 Mustang isn’t broken. They don’t have proper seat belts, the visibility through the windshield is questionable, the emissions and fuel economy aren’t so great, and it’s just not the fun ride across country that it used to be. The internet changes around us, and standing still isn’t one of the choices.
The only way through is forward.
elfling’s most used tags
Pages that are staying in the old format for a while still:
- Comment replies
- Your stream page (which shows stories from the tags, groups, and authors you follow)
- Your drafts page
- Private messaging
Some of these pages aren’t directly linked from the new pages, but they’re all accessible via the right hand drop down menu under your name/avatar.
This is beta.
We’ll be keeping all the old pages around for a while side by side while we work out the concerns and issues. This will make it easy for everyone to compare and ensure that no workflows are broken while we finish the work.
Future goals:
- Integrate in list views of stories and comments, so you can easily choose either a browse or search type activity
- Port the other old format pages in to the new codebase and integrate their links more tightly
Thanks in advance, everyone, for your thoughtful feedback and patience.
