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This is the fifth and final post in our series discussing the redesign of Stack Overflow. If you haven’t yet, we recommend reading Part 1: A First Look: Stack Overflow redesign first, which explains the project's goals and scope.

In this post, we’ll look at the user profile page. Our goal is to give you better tools to showcase your expertise and contributions, making your profile a more powerful representation of your skills and impact on the community.

Redesigned User Profile

We want your profile to be a place where you can build your personal brand within the developer community.

Current Profile Page:

Screenshot of current profile page on Stack Overflow

Screenshot of the current profile page in dark mode on Stack Overflow

Screenshot of current activity page on Stack Overflow

Screenshot of current activity page in dark mode on Stack Overflow

New Profile Page:

Mockup of new profile page

Mockup of new profile page in dark mode

Mockup of new activity page

Mockup of new activity page in dark mode

What's changed and why:

  • A dedicated Profile section to tell your story: This section is all about you and will be similar in spirit to the old Developer Story. It’s a dedicated space to build your professional story by adding tags to represent your skills, writing a detailed bio, and linking to external projects, portfolios, or other sites.
  • A combined view of Activity and Achievements: To start, we’re bringing your reputation, badges, and activity into a single, combined view. Looking ahead, we want to work with you to explore how this page can better reflect the full scope of your contributions—the work and expertise you invest in the community. Your input will be essential as we explore future improvements, including the potential for new metrics that capture your overall impact.
  • Simpler profile navigation: Navigating your own profile can be confusing as you have to jump between left navigation and a separate set of top tabs. We’re proposing a simpler model where the left navigation will be fully dedicated to your profile, with primary sections like “Profile,” “Activity,” and “Settings” housed in one logical place. This declutters the interface and makes moving between different parts of your profile faster and easier.

We want your feedback:

  • Tell us about a time you visited another user's profile. What were you hoping to find?
  • When it comes to your own profile, what story do you want it to tell other users or potential employers? What's missing right now that would help tell that story?
  • If we could give you the perfect summary of your or another person's recent activity, what would it include and, just as importantly, what would it leave out?
  • What’s more valuable to you: a comprehensive list of every single action or a curated highlight reel of the most impactful contributions?
  • Think about how you use the Activity feed today. Are you looking at your own recent actions or someone else's?

Join the Conversation

Please share your thoughts on these changes below. This is the last post in our series, and we appreciate all the feedback you’ve provided.

You can find the other posts here:

Thank you for your input!

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    The new design looks more like a carbon copy of GitHub or Discourse. I like the old design better as being more unique and refreshing. Commented Oct 6 at 19:08
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    I like how personal the page feels, and especially like the use of colors on the badges page. The current layouts feel like it's had stuff tacked onto it over the years so a more complete refresh is nice. Commented Oct 6 at 21:35
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    I like having more information immediately visible on the summary page, but the colours are difficult to look at. The top half of this, which I think you are trying to highlight - that I'm going to desperately scroll off screen as fast as possible. (Sometimes a small screen is a pain; other times, it's a sanity-saver.) Much less important: I thought the gold in the dark screenshot was meant to be bronze and wondered why the order was reversed. Commented Oct 7 at 1:04
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    I don't understand what's different between the About (old)/About me (new) section? I also wish the comparisons were... comparable? E.g. Spevacus presumably doesn't have location set, or it'd show next to their profile pic. Cactus does, and it shows in the mockup. That might lead one to (erroneously) conclude that we can't/don't show location in the current profiles, but that we could in the new. Commented Oct 7 at 1:53
  • I will need to get used to the blue as silver. I liked the silver. Commented Oct 7 at 5:23
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    Why silver badge has blue color and reputation gray? If anything those colors should be reversed. Also green badge for reputation is too light and it is hard to read white letters on it. Commented Oct 7 at 18:38
  • too blocky. I like the current one better for it's rounded edges. Commented Oct 7 at 20:15
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    Finally using the left nav for nav-vy things. I like it! Is "Tech Stack" and "Projects" a part of the "About Me" or their own sections? If so, please consider making "Tech Stack" and other headers configurable. That way, if later you decide to roll out this profile design network-wide, we don't have non-tech sites having a "tech stack" on the profile :) Commented Oct 7 at 22:41
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    I also agree that "Silver Badges" should be silver... not blue. Also what is the percent sign at the end of the "Top Tags" line meant to signify? "53 posts %" doesn't read right. Commented Oct 7 at 22:43
  • What tags are added to the dev story profile page? Is it automatic or managed by the user? Commented Oct 8 at 12:28
  • @Robotnik 53% of the posts that user has are in the tag. The example doesn't add up but it's an example. The information is exactly the same as now you have 26 posts for the [discussion] tag - out of your 55 posts total, that's 26/55 = 47% Commented Oct 9 at 13:11
  • Reputation should be green. Seeing the green +10 in the header gives me a very good motivation. Commented Oct 20 at 17:05

14 Answers 14

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User page

This looks like a YouTube channel's page. Is that what you're going for?

Also, that banner. Is that meant to be something you can customise?

highlighted text on summary page - dark mode

The highlighted text is kinda hard to look at. Especially on light mode.

highlighted text on summary page - light mode

Why is it highlighted? It doesn't look like it has any connection to the Reputation graph right next to it, so... it's not like it's signifying anything colour-wise.

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    Yes the banner image is meant to be customizable per user (mockup image is just an example). We're using the color highlights here to bring prominence to the user's overall stats (against the entire page), we'd love to know how valuable this information is compared to everything else on the page. This design is still in its early stages, so we appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback as we continue to develop it. Commented Oct 6 at 19:41
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    @Carrott If you just want them to stand out, put them in a box with a background color or something. Using different colors implies those colors have meaning, which they don't. The color bars with different end points is jarring. The text is hard to read. It probably looks doubly bad for color-blind users. It's exactly the sort of thing you mentally filter out as too much effort to decipher, which is the opposite of what you're going for. Commented Oct 6 at 22:26
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    Very good sum up comparing the user page to a youtube profile, the problem being that youtube profile's give no emphasis to the user just to the content. And SE is about the users, their profiles matter, it's part of their digital identity on the network. Commented Oct 7 at 17:05
  • It's not just youtube. Linkedin, Facebook, and other social media sites have a similar banner section. I think it's just the trend. Commented Oct 10 at 18:51
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What would it look like if someone didn't want to fill in those details on the "My Story" page? Does it make the overall profile look janky and incomplete, or can that page simply be disabled and not show up in the left-hand column at all?

That page contains a lot of personal information in a format that's easy for bots, identity thieves, etc. to data mine. I anticipate that a significant portion of the user base will not be interested in exposing that information to the general public. Unless you're also planning on implementing some sort of access control feature?

What’s more valuable to you: a comprehensive list of every single action or a curated highlight reel of the most impactful contributions?

A "curated highlight reel" is just another way of saying that you're trying to guess what I think is important. Why would I want that? You have no way of knowing what I'm looking for at that moment. If you go that route, you'll be wrong far more often than you're right. Just show me all the information. Give me tools to sort/filter it, but let me control the tools.

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19

Tell us about a time you visited another user's profile. What were you hoping to find?

Proof or disproof of vandalism, spam, abuse.

If we could give you the perfect summary of your or another person's recent activity, what would it include and, just as importantly, what would it leave out?

What’s more valuable to you: a comprehensive list of every single action or a curated highlight reel of the most impactful contributions?

Think about how you use the Activity feed today. Are you looking at your own recent actions or someone else's?

It is ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL that there is a full feed of actions a user has taken. As far as I am concerned, the current feed of actions is enough. Some actions, like voting, are hidden but for a good reason.

  • Recent low-scored posts are often good indication that the user has probably been posting inappropriate stuff.
  • Some users leave abuse or (as of late) spam in comments. If they had a recent infraction, then tracking down what comments they posted is also very important.
  • Some users do abusive/spam/trolling/or just plain bad suggested edits. Being able to see all their suggestions is important to determine if it was a one-off or a persistent problem.
  • Similar sentiment for full revisions, rather than suggestions. Most of the time, what can be found there is self-vandalism sprees.
  • Checking reviews is similarly important to see whether somebody did a minor slip or has a history of robo-reviewing.

And so on.

If there is some sort of summary, it should not be all the information about user actions.

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    The current "All actions" feed would remain in place for this new version. Would you prefer to see this page higher up in the Activity's navigation list (moving it up to the second slot under Summary for example)? Commented Oct 6 at 20:13
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    It doesn't need to be higher up. It does expose a lot of information, so it's probably better to not be up top. Getting access to questions or answers of a user and other data is probably more useful more often. I just wanted to stress that the information shouldn't be hidden. Commented Oct 6 at 20:17
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I go through a lot of profiles in a day for spammer handling. A lot of this is profile spam and even more is spam accounts. Practically this is a significant use of a user's profile for me

As a moderator - which of these pages would have the moderation tools?

With the pages split, we have a very information dense summary page and a My Story Page. The former is where a moderator would traditionally go to moderator message or destroy a user (and once again, I need keyboard shortcuts to be roughly comparable to what we have now to moderate efficiently on a bad day). The latter is where I'd see profile spam and decide how to handle it.

So - where would I land if I'm checking a user's profile by clicking on their ava? Where should I be acting on where dealing with a problem user?

With design changes, some shortcuts will change too. Could we have comparable or better tools for spammer handling? Maybe a way to clear a profile network side and at the very least basic moderation tools accessible via keyboard shortcuts?

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    Current thinking is to keep the existing "landing page", when you click a user's profile avatar, you'd be taken to the Activity > Summary. We're planning a separate post for all moderation navigation that will be shared with the mods to discuss what works/what doesn't. If mod tools need to remain visible on all sub pages of the profile, we'd find a solution that meets that need (like giving them their own collapsible section on the left panel below the user's avatar/username for example). Commented Oct 6 at 19:49
  • @Carrott - It'd be good to see some thought put into integrating the mod tooling more fully with other user activity info - it currently feels "tacked on". For example, there's two places to see flags on a user account, depending if you want to see flags the user has raised vs flags others have raised on the user's posts. Commented Oct 9 at 3:30
11

The stats on the new page on the top left seem like a cacophony of colours. It is very visually loud, especially with the badges following afterwards.

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    This design is still in its early stages, so we appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback as we continue to develop it. Is there anything on the profile or activity page that you think should be more prominent than the rest (what's most useful/valuable to you)? Commented Oct 6 at 19:58
11

I started this as a comment to wizzwizz4's answer, but it grew to large.

To start with and echo wizzwizz, I'd love Developer Story to come back. As this stands though, this isn't developer story, but does share components of it.

Piper asks:

You say that the developer story doesn't make a good profile for you. Why is that? What are the key differences for you?

A profile page is not developer story though. The developer story was tied, explicitly, to either looking for a job or looking for a candidate. The person that created the story had an incentive to fill it out, spruce it up, and maintain it. A profile page is mostly set and forget.

Showing my bias, I'm slightly suspicious of putting this in my profile. Why would I, as a user, provide Stack Overflow with my LinkedIn information (essentially) if I can't network and I can't use it for a job application? Sure, there is Stack Overflow Jobs, but it requires an Indeed profile.

So, serious question, why should I provide my job history on my profile when I'm likely using LinkedIn (or Indeed) to apply for a job and those systems already require this information?

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I suggest that if you want to provide a lot of statistics next to each other, they should be aligned. Having to zig-zag your gaze to read what exact number each row has is very annoying and very error-prone. 40 and 400 are an order of magnitude off and missing that one has an extra digit can be quite misleading. Ditto for suffixes.

Thus is easy to see (or "not see) in the stats on the top left - you have to zig-zag to read all of them and even then, there is a "10.0m" right above a "50" and it is hard to distinguish that there is a huge difference between the numbers.

Same problem with the "Top tags" component in the middle left. The numbers are all over the place.

The current "Top tags" component at least has the numbers in roughly the same place, even if they are not aligned as columns, they can be visually absorbed vertically:

Tags component shows the tag aligned left, the score, number of posts, and percentage of posts aligned right.

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    Very helpful context and feedback, we'll take note as we continue to develop this page. Commented Oct 6 at 20:01
9

I would love to have Developer Story back, and it looks like you would, too. Please un-sunset Developer Story, rather than trying to turn the Profile Page (which serves a different purpose) into a Developer Story replacement.

This is a decent design for a Developer Story reboot. (I have opinions about it, but honestly I don't care so much about the details, so long as we get Developer Story back.) However, it does not make a good Profile Page.

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    You say that the developer story doesn't make a good profile for you. Why is that? What are the key differences for you? Commented Oct 6 at 18:29
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    What I liked about the developer story was that it could be kept hidden and only shown to prospective employers. Im not really that interested in sharing that info publicly on my profile, my profile is for my accomplishments here. but eh, as long as me not using it doesn’t make my profile look incomplete, I don’t see a problem for it existing for those who want it. Commented Oct 6 at 18:41
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    @Piper When I visit someone's profile page, it's to get contact details, consult their About M, to look up specific things about their activity (which requires that the profile pages have a particular layout), or to do moderator stuff. The current design makes all of that easy. A well-designed Developer Story page would make most of that hard. Commented Oct 6 at 18:48
  • @wizzwizz4 agree with your point but I'm not a fan of calling this "easy" with the current design, as it requires one extra click for most of these things ever since the "activity" page was relegated to a second tab in favour of making the "profile" page the default (when viewing the profile page of other users; one's own profile defaults to activity). Yes that was years ago but I still think that should be different or at least configurable. Commented Oct 7 at 9:49
  • I would have agreed with this back when DS was sunset. But these days are over and today it's completely unclear to me why I would want something like this on SO. The gravity of SO that made DS useful is gone. Commented Oct 7 at 11:03
  • @l4mpi It defaults to Activity on the site I mod: maybe that's why I think it's easy. Commented Oct 7 at 11:48
  • @wizzwizz4 interesting, I was not aware it changes by site. It defaults to Profile on SO and meta.SE for me, I assumed that was network wide. Or maybe it's simply special-cased for mods to default to Activity instead - I just opened retrocomputing in a private window and clicked on a random user, that opened the Profile page and not Activity. Commented Oct 7 at 11:51
  • @MisterMiyagi There's no reason we can't bring back that gravity – although I wouldn't mind bringing this to the other sites, too. No reason a vet shouldn't be able to use Pets as a CV. While Stack Overflow's name has been somewhat dragged through the mud, Stack Exchange has a broadly positive reputation among those acquaintances of mine who've heard of it. Commented Oct 7 at 20:20
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    @wizzwizz4 Well, step 1 is bringing back that gravity, then. Not goodies that will look horribly outdated when – if – that gravity is back. Commented Oct 8 at 3:47
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As a moderator (and previously as a curator), I want to be able to quickly grasp complete user's posting activity on the site.

That means, besides questions and answers, on the Summary page I want to see whether they have posted any Articles, or Discussions (Challenges). Finding those requires additional effort and since most users don't have any, it is easy to forget checking them.

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6

Badges looks like a bunch of cyclopean monsters from some old iphone game.

why is silver a hexagon, bronze a pentagon and gold a square?

picture of the badges

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    yeah, I get some minecraft wither vibes :P and... are those mustaches? (said in jest) Commented Oct 10 at 0:13
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    heh, I was thinking they were fangs Commented Oct 10 at 4:06
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    I'm guessing here, but I imagine the shapes are for color-blind friendliness? Since it distinguishes the badge types by more than just color. Commented Oct 10 at 15:39
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I always disliked the current user profile look. I felt that it considers me stupid, and in order to make it stupid-compatible, it makes everything hardly discoverable.

For example, having 8 vital stats in a row is pretty fine. Hiding them below sub-menus is not.

Note, before the current design, until about 2019 (?), there was a yet more old, single-page user profile design, I believe it was the best. I would suggest to check it - if not others, then in archive.org pages of user profiles. Example.

The scores show, your user profile change looks the most liked and I second it.

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Regarding the icons:

  • Can we reconsider the Twitter one?
  • For GitHub, in your dark mode screenshot, can it please use the other icon that's meant for dark mode?
  • On the summary page, there's a download icon. It (presumably) downloads something, but what?
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    For the first iteration, we'll likely just be porting over existing functionality for social icons — so I suspect we won't be able to add any additional ones but I'm making a note for a tech investigation on effort at least. Github: assuming this is a 1 line fix, we should be able to... I'll make a note of that as well. Commented Oct 6 at 19:53
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    Download icon: We're exploring the idea of a "downloadable" profile that you could export/share for personal or professional use outside of Stack Overflow. Is this something you would find valuable? Commented Oct 6 at 19:55
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    @Carrott I think you're putting the cart before the horse. What is the use case you're envisioning for this? I'm just thinking about situations where I would want to share my profile for "personal or professional use". Personal? So what, I'm out to dinner with friends, or on a date, or visiting my mom, and I say "hey look at the export of my Stack Exchange profile!". Or professional - I'm in a job interview and they want to know how well I can write SQL, and I say "well I sure can answer other people's questions about it", but that's not what they seek. What is the use case? Commented Oct 7 at 13:04
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    @TJM The idea has been mentioned by users in research interviews, which suggests there's a use case. We're trying to gauge how much interest there is — this is just an idea at this point. Some examples we've heard: for job applications (some systems don't accept external link but allow PDF uploads), ability to use/share the data in a custom format (manipulating a CSV file for data visualization, for personal records), research analysis etc. Commented Oct 7 at 17:05
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    Ah! Yes a data dump would be cool, misunderstood what "export/share" means. Definitely sounds interesting. Commented Oct 7 at 17:07
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Do you have plans for when/if this expands off of Stack Overflow?

The first post in this series said:

However, this update will not hit the whole network at once. We will start with Stack Overflow, focusing on the homepage, questions, AI Assist, and profile.

So, I understand if you haven't thought this all through for non-SO sites. But do you have any ideas for when/if the new-style profile pages "hit the whole network"? Things like "Tech Stack" for a list of top tags, or a timeline of resume events, are most likely incredibly irrelevant to, say, Puzzling SE. Most folks there are nowhere near to professional puzzle-makers. By and large we have day jobs and just puzzle as a hobby. The Developer Story stuff implicitly assumes that the topic of the site is your profession, and therefore you have a story of your profession to share.

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2

The Saves section seems to be missing from the profile. Accidental or is something happening with Saves?

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    With the upcoming navigation changes, we're moving 'Saves' out of the user profile and into the main left navigation for better visibility and access. Commented Oct 6 at 20:08
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    @Carrott: Makes sense. The original placement of Saves was honestly an oddly inconvenient spot to put them if they're meant to be used for easy reference later. Commented Oct 8 at 4:47

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