i love the “what’s new” widget in the edgeryders site. it always gives me an opportunity to see whats the latest thing that someone said. id imagine that this kind of presentation helps orient users to the latest activity and promotes continuity of action. but the widget is only selectively available on the site. I think it would be especially important to have it on the home page. since sometimes its the most important question i have about edgeryders: whats the latest thing?. the what’s new widge isn’t on the landing page, which is where id most expect that kind of helpful widget to be.
another thing is that id like to see more UX functionalities that make it easier for non-power users such as myself to contribute. for instance i just wanted to drop a few comments somewhere. maybe a power user wouldve directed my comments to the appropriate person or project. but i wasn’t inclined to create a post about it. right now twitter is the best place to just drop a note. but i also sense that one of the objectives of edgeryders is to resist becoming depending on 3rd party networking tools. do you think that maybe we should in-source some kind of tool that would make it easier for people to simply drop a note or a comment. posts, per edgeryders suggestion, should anywhere from 3 to 8 paragraphs. perhaps there is some place where the edgeryders does go to interact using shorter format posting but i simply dont know where that is …besides going to 3rd party channels.
speaking of shorter textual formats. one feature i am absolutely falling in love with is the ability to overlay comments directly on text in a blog post, for example (something a la medium.com). but i dont think we should be relying on blog posts alone to generate quick interactions on the edgeryders site.
In this six month i’m nomad around Europe and i would find incredibely useful to be able to perform a search on Edgeryders about who is living in the city i’m arriving, to get in touch with them, creating the opportunity to strengthen the relations and the network through real life meeting.
So i can associate nick and thumbnails with real people, i can share experience, knowledge and questions, be more directly linked to the good stuff happening in that city and could be collaborate/help on some local project.
It would be really useful.
Another related thing i feel is missing is a full list of the user here.
Hi Cristiano, indeed being able to run a quick check on who’s based where is something that’s been pointed out by others as well. There’s an ongoing discussion about installing a mapping module to retrieve locations and output them into a map. That would make it easy to get in touch.
As for the list of all Edgeryders, here it is, and I’ll also add a link to it in relevant blocks and places on the website. Well spotted, thanks
[saidhamideh], thanks for the hints. I have much the same problem as you do with figuring out what the latest thing is – in fact, I have quite a thing for feeds. Here are two ways that I try and solve it.
I access the What's new page. It's right there on the main menu, so one click away from anywhere in the site. Absolutely everything is recorded there in chronological order.
I also tried to make a dashboard page that summarizes the activity on the website. In fact, I made it as a candidate home page, but I ran an A-B test with Google Analytics and, to my amazement, it lost out to the current home page. It may be a mistake: the A-B test is biased by what the few power users do. In fact, I still use it as my landing page. What do you think? Should we give it another try?
