Updated: New Profile Editor

We just updated the profile editor this past week. There were a growing number of problems with the old one, and we wanted to lay the groundwork for a few additional features we’re planning.

I started off by making a list of what we didn’t like:

1. Profile editor was under the shell of a group site
   When a member belongs to more than one site, their profile is actually shared. Having the editor under the shell of any one group site make this unclear.
2. Cumbersome to edit data
   Each line of information required a click to edit, a click to save, and two server requests. This could be much simpler.
3. No good place for group-specific profile info
   We’d like to allow each group to add their own additional profile questions, but there was no good place to add these questions.
4. Parent contact information was buried
   Many users didn’t know this existed, and therefore didn’t fill it out.
5. Illogical parent contact separation
   Parent e-mail addresses had their own separate page, but parent mailing addresses were supposed to be entered on your profile. Many users also only provided a home address, assuming we would know this was their parent’s address too.
6. Inconvenient e-mail update flow
   To prevent users from missing messages, we needed to ensure that you could never remove a verified primary e-mail address without providing a new one in its place.

Many of these were minor issues, but we knew we could do better. We started off with a brand new profile editing site at https://profile.gozuus.com. We gave it a different look, so that users would know it was external to their GoZuus group site. We made it faster to edit, cleanly separated parent contact information onto a new page, and provided a separate profile page for each group to which you belong. Here’s what it looks like now:

Watch for more enhancements to this feature and the user directory in coming months! As always, if you have suggestions please let us know!