Enhancing User Profiles

Posted by Mark Randall, Nov 08, 2009 1:34 pm

As often happens, as events unfold the development team see new possibilities and new areas present for improvement or expansion.

We have been dealing with a couple of major virtual conferences as of late and one of the issues that we came across was the extent of our user profile system.

Our old profile system was, it has to be said, fairly limited. The most important elements of it were a person's real name (if different from their username), their organization and their position. We found that this gave our users enough information to identify each other but little more.



Taking this on board, we have now expanded the profile system to give our users a way of sharing much more information with other virtual users. Understandably, not all of our users will want to spend too long a time filling in an extensive profile so we are fairly flexible.

From registration a user's profile will include their name, profile picture and country. This can then be extended to include bios, links to various websites such as Twitter and LinkedIn and of course additional contact information such as instant messenger applications and public addresses.

We have also extended the profile system to display information on mutual events. For example: if the profile owner attended "Virtual Technology Panel" in the Digitell3D Network and the person viewing the profile was also in the Digitell3D network the profile would display the owners attending of that event.

Over all we hope that these improvements will help develop a sense of social community and enhanced interest among our users.