Dashboard updates: Activity Stream A/B Testing and more

Removing the trophies from the dashboard is fantastic!  Now I don’t need to be forever scrolling down every single time I go to my dashboard to use the tools.  I haven’t had a good look at the rest of the changes, but I’m over the moon about the trophy removal.  It’s easy enough to find them if you want them. 

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOve seeing the Squidoo HQ news on the activity screen. My regular e-mail gets clogged with so much junk mail but I love having it on this stream where it’s most relevant. Thanks Megan and Squidoo HQ, Gil, Tom and you’all for continually working through improvements. It is most appreciated.

I love the new activity page! Great way to stay in the loop. Thanks for the update.

I think I will like the new look, especially the addition of HQ News. I want to stay as current as possible and sometimes I forget to check the News. This new format will help me keep up to date on the news as well as my activity. I can check my lenses anytime after the news.

I think it’s a bit of a pain having the quests in my activity stream because they are something else to scroll through when I want to revisit a lens I’ve already liked or blessed, plus I keep tabs on the quests I’ve already completed anyway so I know how many I have remaining.

With that said though, I feel that this is a great idea for new squids on the block because the quests will be simpler to find, I know it took forever to find the “Quests” tab to start with, so keep up the good work, developers

Okay, I’m one of the few who does not like this. I do not like doing the quests, so I prefer it how it used to be. And I also am not that interested in having things like Lens of the Day show up in the same area where I can keep track of whether something has sold from one of my modules, who has commented on what lens or liked a lens, etc. It seems more of a mess of information overload to me. Sorry.

I like the dashboard look without the annoying OpenGraph reminder. I miss my trophies, but do agree that the dashboard looks less cluttered and there’s less scrolling. I wouldn’t go back. So thumbs up there. I’m not so sure how I feel about the activity stream. It doesn’t look like a major change and yet it feels off. Will live with it for a bit and see if I can figure out what irks me about it. I would be annoyed if my default was to go to my activity stream and am glad that that can be changed if needed. *TravelingRae

The look of the new activity stream is fine with me.
However, the list of ‘non activity’ items goes on forever, while my lens activity seems to be truncated at one day or less.

For example – it tells me that there was voting for community favorites some 27 days ago (voting now closed)  but I do NOT see visitors, angel blesslngs, etc from as recently as YESTERDAY.

Ahh that explains what they were talking about on SquidU.  As a Giant I haven’t really noticed any major differences (which doesn’t mean there aren’t any – I was just focused on editing a lens).

Definitely any changes that make it easier to get to my stats and settings are good to have, especially things that save me from having to keep scrolling down.

General dislike. Though it may just be breakage, rather than deliberate design.

I don’t mind having the quests and news stuff in the feed, that’s fine and handy. I do mind that:

a) I’ve lost all my activity stats but quizzes, comments and sales (interaction is awesome information)
b) they only go back a day (really? I loved having a history of stuff. especially if I go away)
c)  It broke Fluff’s add-on to sort everything by type. I’m sure he’ll fix it soon, but a built in filter like that would be AWESOME – when I don’t have it, I usually don’t bother browsing the activity tab, but when I do, I use it frequently.

Guess I’m one of the exceptions, but I absolutely *hate* the co-mingling of quests, news etc. within my activity stream.  I don’t want that extra *clutter* within my activity stream, which I use for monitoring my sites’ activity and as an aid to know who has SquidLiked, angel blessed,  commented, etc. so I can thank them and check out some of their lenses.  My activity streams are quite long each day, so what I’m now seeing usually won’t even include a whole hour, let alone a day.  Plus, I’m really behind and NEED access to my historical activity data!!

I have a lot of poll and quiz activity.  It’s important to me to see which batch of quizzes and polls is being responded to so that I know what people like.    This provides very helpful feedback for me.  [Not every participant SquidLikes a lens, and some visitors SquidLike only and don't otherwise participate.  So I can't rely on the number of SquidLikes for this feedback.]

If the new co-mingled structure is permanently set into place, it’ll no longer meet my needs and I’ll probably just stop even looking at it.  Sorry, but the new system being tested is much less helpful to me than the previous version.  Please, please!! don’t change to the new test system.

Perhaps the quests and HQ news items could be listed in a separate tab on our dashboard.  But that info. is already easily accessible through the drop-down “Helps & Tips” menu at the top of my dashboard.  And quests we’re eligible for are already in our Quests tab.  And if a quest hasn’t been made available to me, then I don’t even care to know about it until the quest is over and the monsterboard has been posted.  Again, that is already availavle in the Helps & Tips > SquidooHQ Blog tab at the top of the dashboard page.

One thing that I would like to see is to somehow be able to download my entire activity stream so I can better keep track of who I’ve followed up with, etc.  Then be able to download more recent activity over a given date range (at least a month’s worth) thereafter.

Increasing the activity stream results from 200 to 500 will definitely help, but it still won’t cover an active day for me.  And sometimes we can’t be on tne computer every day to catch things before they “scroll off the stream”.

If you do decide to go to this new activity stream, could you please temporarily reinstate the old stream with our complete history and give us a good week to go in and *retrieve* as much as we can?  To have something that is beneficial and completely relied upon [i.e., our historical activity stream] *suddenly* unavailable without warning is very dis-heartening!

Except for this sudden test/change, I am very pleased with Squidoo’s efforts to help its lensmasters.  And I am truly amazed with everything that goes on in the background to keep track of all these details and update our dashboards in real time!

Eep! Wait!

Please do NOT wipe out the only organized place we had to track sales!

The rest of the points/activities stream was irrelevant for those of us who are using Squidoo professionally, but the at-a-glance record of sales — not just today’s, but going back at least a month — was vital. Fluff had given us a handy tool to sort out the sales data and hide all the signal noise. It was the only place where we could get an easy-to-read list of which lenses have made sales and what they’ve sold.

The new “improved” activity stream only shows information about our own lenses for today, and HQ posts going back at least a month. Could we reverse that, maybe? Or at least give us some way to access our sales data, since for many of us, that’s a heckuva lot more important than Kipsy and Bipsy and Quests?

If you want to improve the activity stream for experienced/professional squids, give us a quick link right in the “sales” announcements on the activities tab pointing to the ‘royalties’ tab of the corresponding lens so we can see the estimated earnings. It’s a weekly chore having to sift through the activity stream for our sales records, filter out all the noise, click each lens that made a sale and open it in a new tab so we don’t lose Fluff’s filtered version of the stream, then click the “royalties” link on each open lens, just to find out how much the estimated royalty was. Yes, we know it’s an estimate, but it still helps us.

I logged in and saw the quests and HQ news taking over my page.  I also noticed the pictures of the lenses or lensmasters were now on the left, not the right.  Since I don’t do the trophies or points, I used this page to find out what sales if any I had, who visited and the lenses I visited.  It made navigating the important things easy for me.

The other things were just as easy to do…if I wanted to know about a quest, I clicked that tab, and if I wanted to know what HQ had to say I clicked that tab in the help section.  Now, it seems the page is a conglomeration where I have to weed through stuff to find what I want.

Another point is the forum was a place to get info, and maybe HQ should post over there again if they are concerned with us getting the info.  All the tips for newbies have nothing to do with many of us, nor are quests if we don’t typically take them.  I just want a simple way to find the info “I” need, not what someone else wants me to have.And the points tab was doing that just fine before this change!

Hey, my little notes for sales, likes, blessings, etc have disappeared.  Why were they removed?

Thanks-a-million for putting back the history.  I love the filters.

Ok just woke up with a redesign of the Activity tab – looks great, one of my favorites is showing the sales, and that’s back. What I’m missing now is the blessings – I guess I could go one by one through the points until I find them, but can we get a button for them as well? I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who’s missing them. Otherwise the layout looks now nice and clean.

Wow, that was quick!  Thanks Gil!

Where do bugs get reported now?  I seem to making sales on my pages and total is not changing.

Oh, thank you!  Thank you!  Thank you so very much.  I was lost without my Activity page.  I so appreciate it that you gave it back ta’ me.  When I saw it was back again, I jus’
hugged it an’ hugged it.  Please don’t ever take it away again.  You can take my blankie (although, I may fight you), if you must.  But please leave me my Activity page.

I really like the way you added buttons so’s we could separate the HQ News an’ the activity, too.  I like it that the HQ News is there to remind us, but I really like it that they can be looked at separately.

I also like Stacy Lou Hardin’s idea for having pages, instead of scrolling.  That would really overcome a lotta’ pro’lems that pop up with scrolling.

Also, I love the idea of being able to go to a lens an’ return a comment, visit, Angel Blessing, whatever… all from the same general area.  I surely hope you will be able to do that for us, Gil.  That would help soooooo much more than I can even express.

One more thing; someone mentioned that it would sure be nice if there were some way to look at HQ Visits, Hi-Level Squid visits, Angel Blessings, Comments an’ Squid Likes as separate groupings… kinda’ like you did with the buttons for Quests, Points, HQ News an’ sales.

If you go to JoAnne Smith’s comment an’ study on it, you will see some really great ideas. 

An’ I so appreciate everything that is being done to let us have access to all the different things, individually.  As someone who struggles with Dyslexia an’ several other learning challenges, I have spent countless hours in trying to make sense of Squidoo.  Many people have done much to help me, but the more I can do for myself, the happier I think everyone will be.

That said, separate tabs are as vital for many of us with learning challenges as pictures are.  It takes a combination of methods an’ media to fully grasp a concept an’ those lessons need to be reinforced over an’ over an’ over again.  Anything you can do to make that type of reinforcement more readily available would help sooooo much.

I realize that it might seem like I am asking for you to make things easier for me, alone, because I have learning disabilities.  But the fact is, we have a whole generation of talented ADHD sufferers jus’ around the corner, ready to take their place in society.  Will we be denying them a chance to learn by not providing accessible tools, in the same way that the little autistic girl, Carly, was unable to communicate until she sat down to a computer an’ took matters into her own hands?  Yes, she had been well-cared for an’ yes, she was loved without reserve.  But she came ALIVE once she figured out that she could begin to communicate.

Please keep in mind that the easier it is for the majority of people to un’erstan’ an’ interact with Squidoo, regardless of education or ability, the more successful Squidoo will be for itself, as well as for Lens Masters, overall.  An’ with that, of course, there will be a continuous cylcle of more success for everyone.

:: Yaya steps down from her soapbox an’ offers it to the next person in line::

Thank you for listening.
An’ ’til the next time, keep a hug on.
 ~ Yaya

Having everything on the activity page is extremely helpful.

I really love getting the HQNews and the SquidQuests right no my Activity feed…I hope you decided to keep it that way!  ;)

I was thinking that if you are able to, if/when you add a button to separate the different special visits (like ‘HQ Visits’, ‘Squid Angel Blessings’… that sorta’ thing… ) d’ya’ think you could also number ‘em?  Like, under the ‘Squid Angel Blessings,’ could you place a number next to each so’s we could keep track of how many we have?
‘Course, my mind can stretch even further an’ ask if you’re able to number ‘em according to how many per lens, but I suspect that That would be a much bigger project.  Maybe you could tinker with the idea in your Spare Time (said entirely with tongue in cheek) whilst you’re twiddling your thumbs an’ dunno’ what to do with yourself, eh?

Whatever you are able to do that would make it easier is greatly appreciated.  I do know that none of this is simply a matter of pushing a few buttons an’ we are all sooooo grateful for the time you are putting in to make things much easier for all of us.

I can’t quite figure out how to include the marshmallows (on accounta’ I burned ‘em an’ all), but I’m sending you summa’ my special homemade hot cocoa an’ my own home baked cookies.  The thing is, I burned the marshmallows when I got busy whilst I was building a lens an’ my virtual oven fergot ta’ turn off.  However, the hot cocoa an’ cookies came out juuuuust right.  Naturally, I was using my virtual stove an’ my virtual oven when I made these, so I surely hope you are able to have yourself a virtual party with ‘em.  Jus’ my way of sayin’ thanks, Gil.  Your efforts deserve somethin’ special. :)

Thank you, Gil, for giving us the option for which page to make our Main Page.  I was s’prised at how cleverly you fixed that.  Thanks so much.

Haha, what a helpful article.  I was just sharpening my knives to complain about the activity page being the main one and all the extra clicking when updating when hey presto!  -  I was told how to easily fix the problem myself.  Thank you.