Ideas for improving user experience

I was discussing ways to improve cdmHub with Dr. Yu and I wanted to hear everyone’s thoughts on my ideas.

The big question for users is “why come to cdmHub when Chat GPT could answer all my questions?”. I think the answer to this question should be networking. This is something exclusive to this site and can’t be provided by any gen-AI. I think that it’s important to orient current/new features around this aspect.

User Profiles
First off, I feel that profiles are the basis of a good networking platform. We can take inspiration from other professional platforms like LinkedIn and GitHub. When you click on a user’s profile, you should be able to quickly understand what kind of person this user is.

On cdmHub, I think there is a lot of unnecessary information on the profile landing page. There are two tabs for “invited” and badges which I don’t think need entire tabs for themselves. The first thing we see on the profile after the description are stats like “days visited” and “read time” which also shouldn’t be so prioritized. I think that the primary things we should immediately see is recent activity, prior work (talks, papers, other publications), and topics/tags they follow. Additionally, a dedicated contact info section could be helpful too. Notably, it’s still important not to add things that already exist on larger platforms like LinkedIn since that would be redundant and diminishes the more exclusive aspects of cdmHub.

Following
As a user, after I find someone with an interesting profile, my next desire would likely be to keep up with this person’s future activity on the site.

A “follow” option could resolve this. This can allow users to be notified when someone they’re following makes a post. It’s also a good way for users to keep track of all the interesting profiles they’ve come across in a “following” list. Follow count can be added to user profiles as a way to show credibility as well. The activity badges can be misleading since they only reward quantity rather than quality.

These are just some high level ideas, but I would love to hear everyone’s thoughts on these!

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I agree, follow option would be a good feature (similar to most social media platforms) to be updated with people’s work/posts.

Also i don’t understand why there is an invites tab on another person’s Bio. Does it show the people they have invited? It makes sense to have it in your own bio to keep track of who has used your invite.

And for the stats - I think Last seen and Trust level could be shown as they indicate when the user has been active and how much they contributed.

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