When you look at a profile, there is a slightly, shaded box below the pictures, which has the information: Residing In; Spouse/Partner; Occupation; Children; Birthday. If you want to see the section: Comments and School Story you must scroll to the very bottom of the page. Is there any way to put the Comments section and School Story section within the shaded box? If there are "shared comments" on the profile, the Comments and School Story are residing even farther down on the profile page. It would be so much more convenient to see comments and school story at the top of the profile page with the rest of the info. How can I move those two items so they appear at the beginning of the profile?

Barbara Rose

I agree.
CC told me that the more people ask for a change, the more likely that it will be implemented.

I also would like to request that the Questions/Answers on the Profile page be moved above the Comments added by classmates. This information gets buried at the bottom of the page and users don't know to scroll to the bottom to find it.

I have had inquiries as to why that info no longer shows up--it was because they didn't know to scroll all the way to the bottom.

At least on older sites, there's far more activity in the comments than changes in the Q/A boxes. That's a reasonable reason to leave the comments on top.
Still, there could be something which reminds people to scroll down when changes are made. And... not that long ago, THERE WAS! At the top, there used to be a small yellow box and text reminding you that the profile had been changed since the last time you looked. That disappeared several months ago, and I haven't seen it since.

That would be a good compromise -- to have a notation near the top of the page that clues the user/viewer to look for information further down the page. Sometimes it is a newly joined classmate looking for information and they have no clue that there is information to be found. I would prefer to have all the information provided for that person before I add to the comments on the page.

So two issues here:

1) The yellow what's new shading isn't appearing in all cases on Profiles apparently. I wasn't aware of that and I'm not sure why. But I'll find out. This alone goes a very long way in solving this issue. We'll need to get this addressed right away that yellow shading is crucial to people understanding what has changed when they are invited back to Profiles via Notify Me.

2) You're going to have to take my word on this one...putting that information at the top of Profiles amounts to bad design. Yes it makes sense very early on when sites are newer. In that state new classmates are coming and and they're enjoying reading all Profiles and all information. But what quickly happens is static content is never visited again. Nobody goes back to the same old content over and over. In fact our internal statistics showed that the original Profile format nearly never got visited anymore once sites were only a few months old. Again why would anyone want to come back? Since creating the new interactive Profile format activity is far higher with good reason. On active class sites there's always something new and interesting to see when you visit your favorite classmates. The last thing you want on the top of Profiles is the same old information everyone has already seen a thousand times before. It's really a question of the value of content, i.e. which makes more sense, static content or dynamic content? There's zero doubt that people return to Profiles to read dynamic new content. Putting the static content affixed at top would only make it more difficult for people to get to what they're actually wanting to read.

Brad Switzer wrote:

To be clear, the yellow highlights on the titles for Q/A boxes which have been updated is working - I think. At one time, that was not consistantly working, but I believe it is now. So are yellow highlights in the personal data (spouse, children, etc) when updated. Unfortunately, there is still no hint that a new photo is "new".

Right now, if you get a Profile Updated notify, or just decide to take a peek at a profile, you have to skim through the comments checking dates to see if there's a new one (or new response under an old one), and then skim through the Q/A boxes looking for the yellow highlight. And then skim through the photos to see if there's one there you don't remember seeing.
As I mentioned above in #4, there used to be a line near the top of a profile which contained a small yellow box and very small font print saying that the profile had been updated since your last visit. If that was restored it could be turned into a link down to the profile question/answers....

Would it only link if there was only one update? What if there is more than one update?

My thought was that it could be a link to the top of the Question/Answers - like a page with an anchor on the Questions and Answers title bar. If nothing else, that would be a way to quickly skip over all the comments. And even better if, like it used to be, it didn't display unless there was something new highlighted down in one or more of the QA set.

I think my concern here is the assumption is the update is in the QA. What if they have just posted a comment at the top of the Profile? Added a new photo? Added a new video? All 4 of these areas can have updates. Thus I'm thinking always anchoring the yellow update link to just one place when the updates can be in 4 places isn't a good idea. I agree with you though, the yellow shading needs to be on ANY item in ANY of these 4 areas to ensure people can quickly and easily find updates.

Point taken. In my experience, there will be more new comments and photos than updated QA text. Consistant yellow shading highlights of changed catagories - including the Recent Comments title bar, the Photos and Video labels under the icons at the top right, and even the QA title bar would cetainly help people find what they're looking for.

With appropriate catagory/title highlights, notice of newly updated content for everything but the QA section would be quickly visible. But there's still a perceived need to link past comments and go straight to the QA section when there's a change/update there.

Why can't there be FOUR links ? IOW there would be 4 yellow update links. It's not going to be very common (so no worry keeping it tidy in the general case ). Solves the problem of various update combinations No different really than What's New with all the 'new' changes.

Brad Switzer wrote:

Hmmm.... As you say, chances are that there would usually be only one catagory updated - unless it's the first time you viewed that profile.
If the 'catagory/title' was highlighted for any updated section, updates to personal data (spouse, kids, etc) is already visible. Photos and Videos would already be one click away. Comments would only be a half page down to check. So the only one that's not quickly visible is the QA section.