launchpadblog

When Launchpad shows someone’s display name, it’s not always clear who it’s referring to.

With so many people registered in Launchpad, it’s not surprising that some of them share a name. However, every Launchpad id is unique. Mine’s matthew.revell and no matter how many other Matthew Revells there might be in Launchpad, I’ll always be the only one with that ID.

To help clarify who’s who, we’re going to show the ID in more places alongside the display name. Two of those places are the person picker — so you know for sure that you’re selecting the right person — and at the top of the profile page.

There was some discussion, though, as to whether people would recognise that we were showing the person’s Launchpad ID. One way to make it clearer, it was suggested, would be to place a tilde in front of the ID.

On Wednesday I set up a survey asking which of these you prefer:

And which of these you prefer:

Rather than say it straight out — i.e. do you like the tilde? — I wanted to see if people noticed it.

The majority of people who responded to the survey said they preferred the versions without the tilde.

For the person picker, 23.6% of the respondents preferred the version with the tilde and 76.4% preferred the version without.

For the profile page it was a little different and even more in favour of the version without the tilde: 18.4% preferred the version with the tilde, whereas 81.6% preferred the version without.

Thanks to everyone who took part. It’s now over the to Teal Squad to digest the results.

Photo by Fling Poo. Licence: CC BY 2.0.

This entry was posted by Matthew Revell on Friday, May 27th, 2011 at 4:19 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.