Cascadia Portal
Where organizations in Cascadia find synergies
There are a myriad organizations and individuals in the region of the Cascade Mountains in the Pacific North West, the Land of the Salmon, that work for the common good. This Cascadia Portal is a place for coming together to look for and achieve what can be done together that cannot be achieved alone. ...learn more
GROUP DETAILS
Created: Sep 28, 2007
Updated: Nov 21, 2009
Membership: Open
Semi-Private
Contacts/Network new designs - seeking community feedback
WiserEarth seeks your feedback
(skip straight to downloading previews of the new designs)
Contacts/network designs
In our surveys, phone call follow-ups and in-person user testing, one common issue we came across was users not knowing how to invite someone, and not being able to more readily view who's in your network. We've designed 3 pages to help address these issues.
The 1st page is the "Invite a contact" page. We've made it the first accessible link from the Contacts drop-down menu to give it greater visibility. You'll see a simple messaging form, allowing you to enter in multiple email recipients and send out. Or, if you prefer, you can login to your account (Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc) and retrieve your address book and easily send out invitations to your contacts. This should dramatically speed up the process of inviting your network over to WiserEarth.
The 2nd page simply shows your "Sent invitations". We've redesigned this so it's easier to see what invitations have been sent, which invites are still pending, etc.
The 3rd page helps you continue to build your network on WiserEarth. We've put in 3 sections here - one to help you find existing users, one to invite your contacts from another provider(i.e. Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc), and a third section to recommend people that you may know (based on connections and similar interests). Putting these features on one page should give users a powerful tool to quickly expand their network and connect with people of similar interests.
The 4th page simply allows you to view who's in your network, and to manage those contacts. You can send a message to them or remove them from your network. We'll also include more information for each user, showing their name, personal headline, location and interests.
Before we progress much further - we want to give the community a chance to weigh in on their thoughts. Let us know what you think of these new designs. Look over the designs and let us know if the various features seem useful. And be sure to let us know if anything seems unclear or confusing - if the terminology used needs to be simpler, if something feels awkwardly placed, etc. Getting your general impressions, as well as any suggestions or questions you might have, will be invaluable as we fine-tune the final designs.
Preview the new designs:
Comments (1 - 10 of 10)
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Bowo, I agreed with your assessment about this contact page being a useful tool to connect internally as a Wiserearth community. What I am interested in is a network of help where in my project or community concern I can query the network with specific competencies, resources or mentoring missing and have interested Wiserearth participants respond with mentoring, invitations or offers to participate in a breakdown or opportunity. My assessment is this page is duplicating standard practices of current social networking platforms interested in generating "numbers" that eventually become a "profit making basis for advertisers" where I see the point of Wiserearth as a living global community developing effective actions. Even if for instance today we have only 200 people fully committed to the Wiserearth platform the question is what would makes us more effective in addressing these five concerns together as a collaborative team? Yesterday I was able to share my musing with you in regards to WEversity on Facebook with a click of a button. Let our demonstration of effective actions become the calling card versus cross-appropriating current successful strategies to social community networks that pass a lot of information and do no thing. I vote for contact page be a robust network of help between committed Wiserearth participants that gets us rocking~N-rolling with one another person~to~person in growing what we really want ~ effective actions ~ history making solidarity and mood of joyful concern as a community. Let the outside social networking communities wake up and get committed to something ~ thats when they choose Wiserearth. Am I a fly in the ointment with these suggestions? Patric |
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Hey Honore, what I meant by that was the ability to load contacts list from FB, gmail, etc. and then add check marks on those one wants to invite, then have them loaded on the "To" field of the left column's "send invitation" section (the section with "To", "Subject" and "Invitation message").
This way, the "To" field would list (i) self-typed email addresses, (ii) WE usernames from the contact search result, and (iii) email addresses loaded/selected from-third-party-accounts. Is this any clearer?
If all at one page is too complex, would contrasting work? i.e. the third-party-account section should be grayed out unless selected (with a check box to "Invite from third party accounts"). Just want to brainstorm the possibility of having all invite options on one page. |
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Hey Kerry, good point about the "Delete | Send message" - I think we can rearrange and space those options out so the first one you see isn't to remove someone from your network.
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Hey Bowo, I'm a bit unclear what you mean by this:
" And not sure if possible, but, inviting from gmail/yahoo/facebook should also be accompanied by an option to "Include in invitation list on the left" (the 'To' field)."
What does invitation list on the left mean?
As for the complexity, that's hard to say. Ideally, we'd like to have everything in one place, but does that make sense for the user if they're seeing it for the first time? Even Facebook's interface here is pretty much 3 things thrown in at once, and I'd like to keep it a bit more simple and streamlined if we could. Only because it would become a rather big nightmare in debugging down the road, and for maintenance too. I mentioned to Angus that while we do want to encourage people to invite through their networks, adding in a section that shows their network contacts is something we can save for a later time. Right now, providing an auto-complete drop-down list of contacts in the "To" field and allowing users to send to multiple recipients would be a big improvement for us, so we'll probably concentrate on making that a reality before we add on to the page. |
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Yes, those links are underlined in the most current revision of this page.
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Not clear on the Sent Invitations page that you can sort by the headers and that you can click on 'Resend' these need to be blue / underlined?
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I would might remove MySpace from the initial third party list and concentrate on Facebook and Twitter, with the email providers (Google, Windows, Yahoo) below. We want to encourage people to link WE to more the social sites than the email sites. MySpace doesn't fit our user profile.
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Don't think the gmail/yahoo/facebook duplication in "Invite contact" page and "Find a contact" page is necessary. I would even go as far as removing the "Find a contact" page all together, and have the "Find people on WiserEarth" search box on top of the "Invite a contact" page. It should be preceeded with a question like: "Is the person you want to invite already on WiserEarth?". Results should be an AJAX loading displaying bare minimum info with option to "Include this person in invitation list below" (the 'To' field).
"People you may know" is already on MyHome, so, that would do I guess...
And not sure if possible, but, inviting from gmail/yahoo/facebook should also be accompanied by an option to "Include in invitation list on the left" (the 'To' field). Also, somehow indicate that some of the contacts are already on WiserEarth during the loading of third-party contacts list(s).
This way, all invites (already on WE, via email, via third party accounts) would be consolidated and users need only send one message, one time (if they choose to mass-invite). All while allowing to see just how many of their friends/network are already on WE.
Question: too much to accomplish on a single page? |
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On page 4, I think Delete and Send Message are a bit too close to one another for being such opposite purposes. Perhaps if Delete was in the far corner? Also, was the Edit Relationship option completely removed? I like having some way to sort/organize contacts. If they could be grouped, that would be another great option, but the label seemed to work too. Looks pretty intuitive otherwise!
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I'm sure you weren't looking for feedback on the initial default message, but there needs to be a short intro on WE that makes it clear it's free & related to green networking.
Manage (p3) & Manage My Contacts (p4) is confusing b/c they seem to be for quite different things.
It's not clear how you get the options for managing on p.3 or how many there are but it could be more directly labeled it Resend or Delete.