A picture’s worth a thousand words, but each Local Guide’s profile is worth much more! If you could showcase anything about yourself and your contributions to the Local Guides community, what would it be? What are you most interested to see about other Local Guides when you view their profiles and contributions?
Viewing a Local Guide’s contributions on mobile reveals their level and number of points, plus the numbers of each contribution type a Local Guide has made for reviews, ratings, photos, videos, answers, edits, places added, facts checked, and Q&A. You can also see the badges he or she has unlocked or is progressing toward. Check this information on your own profile any time by selecting My Contributions on mobile.
We’re always interested in improving Google Maps and the Local Guides program based on what users have to say. So tell us, what profile information would you add or change and why? What would you like to see about other Local Guides on their profiles? We’d love to hear from you!
I’ve always wanted to know how long some Local Guides have been Local Guides. So a phrase that said “Local Guide Since March, 2017” would be nice from my perspective.
Sometimes we want more information about a Local guide’s contributions under a category. For example, I would want to be able to click into the “added paces” category and see the region(s) a Local Guide has contributed to the most.
Lastly, the chosen image of each Local Guide is already on their public profile, however, unless the face is familiar, you can’t get a clearer Image by simply clicking on the Image. I think it might be good if a click can enhance the visibility of a picture photo.
What about the date of the last contribution? In terms of gamification, this could also serve as an incentive to some to contribute on a regular basis (as my assumption is that people - given the knowledge that this is publically shown - will want to make sure this is always very recent).
[Perhaps a bit edgy from privacy perspective, but then again there could be a option to switch this off in the privacy settings.]
I would say that any such additions should take into account delicate balancing between useful/cool metrics vs. privacy/security. For example, if someone is a harsh but fair critic, and a store owner really doesn’t like their store review, does having something like a review heat map or pattern tracking put the reviewer at risk? I don’t know what the answer is, but it’s something to think about. Granted, info from reviews & ratings are public anyway, but it depends what kind of changes are being proposed.
Back to your question…
I’d also like to see date since becoming an LG.
Contributions over time (graph). Maybe have user option to select whether it’s made public or not.
Having 360/VR/3D contributions being measured and listed separately from static photos or regular video is something that would be cool.
A short tagline that users can write to describe themselves? Although this may just lead to more work, requiring some monitoring and censoring against abuse. Maybe more trouble than it’s worth?
Thank you for proposing this topic.
I would like to see my level and my 4 masters.
Optionally, the contributions could be shown with updated figures or as close as possible to the real ones. The figures that appear several months ago, do not motivate me to publish. I’m almost not working, to see if they can be updated. It will be a particular case, but I am ashamed of what is shown of me.
The point is: publicly show my level and my 4 masters updated. All other data and accesses I want to decide, when I make them public or not.
Thank you again, I consider it extremely gentle, subtle, to ask ourselves this.
Best regards.
This is a little suggestion for make a detailed information page for every Local Guides ( I edited this on smartphone so very limited)! I also suggest to put the relative flag before or after the country and change the color of the main star exactly following the colors related to each level (example rose for level 6, orange for level 7, green for level 8 etc etc).
We should think back to first principles: why are we looking at someone else’s profile. For me there are a few reasons:
To see how credible this person’s reviews are.
Date joined
History of activity
Quality of other reviews
real person or spammer
To see what other good places I can find from this person reviews
I want to see their best or most favorite restaurants - preferably from Lists
It would be nice to have some way to get updated of new reviews from them, or actually to bookmark their profile
I think LG should be more focused on community building and linking within the Maps ecosystem (instead of LGC which is kinda split), and also to increase the value and standing of Maps reviews.
Eg full blogger or instagrammers have much higher visibility, personality and individuality than Maps reviews which by current design are very short/throwaway/fleeting. Having a very different design/structure of reviews and profile pages would greatly increase or encourage the development of better written and formatted reviews.
Huge ton of backend data available in the system that could be surfaced carefully.
Suggested places by your ‘friends’?
Places liked by your ‘friends’?
All very important to develop an ecosystem which retains users, increase participation and bring recurring increased value with increased usage.
Tally of how many reviews the person wrote for each star ranking.
e.g. if 95% of the person’s reviews are 5 star, I’m probably going to take their “recommendations” with a grain of salt. Same thing for people who give everything one star.
However, I would keep a lot of personal information separate from Google Maps and I also explain why: Google Maps is used by millions of users every day (and only a few of them are Local Guides) and these people only look for information both to get to a place and to explore the surroundings for a restaurant, a bar, a petrol station, a hotel etc. etc. Maybe someone will be intrigued by the Local Guides program, but then it is right to be directed to the Connect forum. The more personal data is exposed in Google Maps, the easier it is for these to be taken in the viewfinder even for reporting only for spite or maybe for error! Let’s think of your most viewed review, to your photo with more views, to all vs top contributions: if they were exposed in evidence as in the window maybe then only a few dozens of reports or thumbs down will be enough to see that contribution disappear due to the algorithms Google servers … and in a moment disappears in the limbo that contribution we so much we wanted, and this maybe only for the action of people envious, bored and even a little ‘stupid’. I would not even like the idea of following a specific Local Guide: both for a privacy statement and for not always feeling like a continuation in all my moves! If someone wants to know something more than me as a Local Guide then it is right that the only place to know me better is the Local Guides Connect forum: here you can contact me and besides me know many other people, but at least it will do so with this specific purpose!
Hi @brittym and thanks for the opportunity to make suggestions. More information, as others have suggested would be nice. However, in my case I would be happy if all the statistics regarding the four badges, plus all the other statistics regarding number of reviews, points, photos, etc were all on one screen. Shown below is a screen scrape of the Local Guide main page current statistic page along with what I have added as missing to give the complete picture of all the major statistics. This is the information as shown on my desktop PC using Windows 10. I realize the space on a mobile device is much more limited, but the idea being to get all the info without having to page through the four badges to get the complete information. Thanks for your efforts. Regards, Koby Ha! I just noticed I missed a new one: # of photo likes
I appreciate your idea of one page Statistics Report, in fact, few days back I had posted my statistics as a “Score Card” but it seems it was not noticed by many members.
I hope your idea get through this channel can achieve the objective.
