Make profile sharing more prominent
Though users can share profiles publicly in a few different ways, they seem less aware of this than we would like. I have a few ideas on how we might improve this.
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I don't think the Share button is as prominent as it could be - it's currently at the bottom, and the same color as other buttons. I think it could stand to be a more distinct color (the bootstrap success color (green)?). Also, when a profile has a long description, it gets hidden off the bottom of the screen, so I think putting it in the box on the left would be better.
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If you don't own a profile, there is no clear indication that it can be made public. In the screenshot above, I'm looking at another project-member's profile, and notice that this is not suggested to me at all. If, for example a student is making profiles, and a faculty member is taking care of releasing software, they may not even realize that it's possible to make it public. I'm not sure we want to allow project members to make each others' profiles public (though maybe project leads?), but maybe we could at least have a greyed-out 'make public' button with a tooltip explaining that the owner has to do it. Hmmm - actually now that I look at it, I don't get an indication when looking at my own profiles that I can make the public, without clicking "Edit" - which is different from how most Share UIs work these days.
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Speaking of how share UIs work, here is a comparison between ours and Google Docs. I would not say that I really like the way Google Docs does it, but it does have the advantage that you can change the settings right from the popover. It also does a concise job of explaining what the sharing options mean.
- For some reason, people seem to think that they can't make profiles public if they use custom disk images. When they toggle public on something, maybe we can include a message to the effect that this makes their disk image public too.