If “Top posts” are enabled and users don’t have custom photos on these top posts (which is the default), the entire screen above the fold is taken up by watercolor and a few post titles. This is unacceptable. Take Eliezer’s user page: it only has about 50 words very far apart. I can’t tell what the posts are about unless I click on them. They should at the very least be smaller and show the start of the post on hover.
Ok, let’s actually compare this. This is what the same amount of vertical space looked like for Eliezer a week ago:
We have a grid of 9 sequences, basically with no ability to tell at all what they are about, and one of them visibly misaligned. The images are broken on archive.org, but they were all basically the same without any indication of what they are about. Then, when you look at the recent post list, you see a bunch of random recent posts, none of which are representative of Eliezer’s writing.
I don’t buy this is any better at showing you what Eliezer’s writing is like, or helping you find good Eliezer content than our current UI. Yes, there are only 4 posts instead of 9 sequence items, but those posts are actually pretty representative of Eliezer, and it is indeed much more important for someone to have something they can click on and start reading, instead of seeing this non-descriptive grid of sequences that then when you click on them require you to choose again (and where most of them have a lot of prerequisites and are not good intro points).
I can’t find a way to choose just 1 or 2 top posts. I would want my own page to have 2 top posts, both at the smaller size.
Yep, this would be nice, but designing UI for any number of posts is just a lot of work. Two posts in-particular is pretty tricky with the way the aspect ratios work out.
The user’s karma, number of comments, number of posts, and account age are not included on the page, even though it’s visible on mouseover. I can understand hiding karma, but all these numbers should be fairly prominent on the user profile. My first priority when I click to many user pages is seeing how established and active they are, which needs these numbers.
You can always get those on hover. Indeed, in basically any context where you would click on the user you would see these statistics first.
But not having these at high prominence is actually really crucial to the new design! A major point of the design is to create a landing page that gives authors the feeling that it is their own landing page, with the focus being on the author’s writing. Karma, in-particular, refocuses the landing page on the relative status of an author in the LessWrong status hierarchy, which I think is really quite bad for a landing page. I don’t want people to have to worry that if they link someone to their LessWrong profile, that what they will end up focusing on is the relative ranking of that LessWrong user with other LessWrong users. Indeed, I don’t want them to have to think much about LessWrong at all, since the profile page is one of the most common entry-points for new users.
The “Sequences” tab is often redundant because most users do not have sequences. They could perhaps go on the right column below the user bio, display the number of posts, and show a preview on mouseover. Or, users should be able to choose a sequence to go in a Top Posts slot.
The sequences tab only shows when you have sequences! Agree it would be redundant otherwise, but we did think of this one.
The “Quick takes” of the Feed tab doesn’t work on my profile.
This is fixed!
Nitpick, but in the profile editing UI the “swap” icon looks like a button that causes an action (I expected it to swap with the one below it or something). It would maybe be more intuitive to have the text “Change” on the button, or a different icon.
Agree, I don’t love that button.
In the Feed tab, posts are not visually distinguished from comments. They should perhaps have the same styling as in the All Posts, or have a solid outline, or something.
I think them not being visually distinguished is fine-ish, but I do think we can make some improvements here. It’s the same styling as on the frontpage, so in as much as there is a mistake here, having it be wrong there is a bigger mistake.
Vercel has to verify my device sometimes when I load a profile, which takes about 1-1.5 seconds. This is also unacceptable if it happens too often, so hopefully it’s just because the page is new.
Should be fixed! But yeah, this was just because we had some aggressive bots hammering those pages.
Overall, feedback appreciated! Agree with like 30%, 30% are fixed and I think no longer apply, and disagree on the other 30%.
Ok, let’s actually compare this. This is what the same amount of vertical space looked like for Eliezer a week ago:
We have a grid of 9 sequences, basically with no ability to tell at all what they are about, and one of them visibly misaligned. The images are broken on archive.org, but they were all basically the same without any indication of what they are about. Then, when you look at the recent post list, you see a bunch of random recent posts, none of which are representative of Eliezer’s writing.
I don’t buy this is any better at showing you what Eliezer’s writing is like, or helping you find good Eliezer content than our current UI. Yes, there are only 4 posts instead of 9 sequence items, but those posts are actually pretty representative of Eliezer, and it is indeed much more important for someone to have something they can click on and start reading, instead of seeing this non-descriptive grid of sequences that then when you click on them require you to choose again (and where most of them have a lot of prerequisites and are not good intro points).
Yep, this would be nice, but designing UI for any number of posts is just a lot of work. Two posts in-particular is pretty tricky with the way the aspect ratios work out.
You can always get those on hover. Indeed, in basically any context where you would click on the user you would see these statistics first.
But not having these at high prominence is actually really crucial to the new design! A major point of the design is to create a landing page that gives authors the feeling that it is their own landing page, with the focus being on the author’s writing. Karma, in-particular, refocuses the landing page on the relative status of an author in the LessWrong status hierarchy, which I think is really quite bad for a landing page. I don’t want people to have to worry that if they link someone to their LessWrong profile, that what they will end up focusing on is the relative ranking of that LessWrong user with other LessWrong users. Indeed, I don’t want them to have to think much about LessWrong at all, since the profile page is one of the most common entry-points for new users.
The sequences tab only shows when you have sequences! Agree it would be redundant otherwise, but we did think of this one.
This is fixed!
Agree, I don’t love that button.
I think them not being visually distinguished is fine-ish, but I do think we can make some improvements here. It’s the same styling as on the frontpage, so in as much as there is a mistake here, having it be wrong there is a bigger mistake.
Should be fixed! But yeah, this was just because we had some aggressive bots hammering those pages.
Overall, feedback appreciated! Agree with like 30%, 30% are fixed and I think no longer apply, and disagree on the other 30%.
I definitely repeatedly being annoyed by the grid of sequences, especially when there’s more than 3 of them.