🤝 Team

Team of Engineers, Head of Product, Product Designer, Community Success Team

🤔 What are Customized Profile Fields?

In Forem Community, every Creator can customize profile fields they can ask their members. So, for example, let's say I have a sports community, and I want to ask for their Favorite athlete and favorite sports. I can create input fields based on it, and those fields will be visible in member's profiles.

This is a great way to give the community a unique, personalized touch.

📃 Problem Statement

• First of all, developers built the current version of profile fields without consulting the design and product, which led to unexpected behaviors and interactions in the current implementation, which makes it almost unusable. So, we will be working on it from scratch only.

• The current structure for profile fields is a bit overwhelming, with many actions upfront. It isn’t evident where to click and what all those actions do.

  

• There is no way admins can reorder the fields or groups. For example, let’s say I want to ask for Education first, and then I want to ask for qualifications. As per the current implementation, if you have first created Qualification, then there is no way you can reorder them. So you will have to delete only and start again.

• A deleting group is confusing without clear messaging.

  

• A deleting group will ungroup all the fields created inside it. So, those ungrouped fields won’t be visible in /settings (which is expected because we don’t want any profile fields floating on the settings page without any structure)

In that case, those fields shouldn’t be visible on the profile page /<username> even if members have filled in the information of that field. But it does, which creates a dead-end for users, where they can not edit that particular information by going to /settings.

The goal here was that admins might want to re-arrange fields, so deleting fields and having them re-create them seems like a lot of effort and data loss.

• The field creation modal is confusing because of a lack of instructions.

  

⛳️ Our Plan

We didn’t want to change anything fundamentally. We tried to keep it as it is and add some new features.

To ensure we are on the right path, we decided to go for User Testing and know if the solution is intuitive and self-explanatory for the Creators/Admin because these Customise Profile Fields initially sound confusing.

So we decided to go for Remote User Testing with the help of a tool called Useberry. It lets you test the Figma prototype with a set of users.

👨🏻‍🔬 User Testing Process ****

Our community success team has a good list of active Forem contributors (Forem Open Source) and Creators. They hooked us up with good creators willing to spend time with our prototype test and give us feedback.

But things don’t always go as planned. So, we created and tested the test internally, and it worked fine. But when we sent it to Creators, we found some weird bug in Useberry software that won’t let creators complete the test. So, our Useberry test failed, and we stepped back.

And then, I decided to go for old and tested Zoom user testing. I connected with two creators via Zoom and let them perform some tasks on the Figma prototype. I recorded the session for our team so they could also observe it.

Here are some notes from the User Testing.

Overall ease of use score - 10/10 (As Forem Pro)