Viadeo’s latest product roll-out brings some eagerly anticipated changes. With the first in a series of updates to the profile and a consolidation of our forum and community products we’re taking further steps towards our goal of improving the user experience for our members. These changes should make it easier to find great content and great people through the network.
Keeping your profile up to date gets easier
Now live on the site is a redesign of the education and professional experience forms.
So what’s new? Previously, you would need to pass through several different pages to add new work experience or educational establishments to your profile. Now you’ll just see a single, easy to use interface for each where you can fill everything in. Within the new editing interface, you’ll also see your first glimpse of the new ‘Career Timeline’ – a visual map of your professional experience.
With this change, you’ll find it much quicker and easier to edit your Viadeo profile. As Nicolas Karlen, Product Manager in charge of the profile feature says “keeping an updated profile on social websites is not an easy task. This is maybe not much of an issue for most of the online services we use daily, but it is critical when it comes to a professional social network like Viadeo. This is why we created the Career Timeline: a simple way to keep control of your professional profile.”
This release also includes an easy way to connect or reconnect with colleagues and alumni right from the timeline page. We think it’s a great way to demonstrate the power of the network and help you discover great people to connect to on the site.
This update is part of a cycle of improvements being made to the core features of the Viadeo profile that will continue throughout 2012 (watch this space!).
Forums and Communities become Groups
This month we see Viadeo Forums (a discussion forum opened by any member), Viadeo Corporate Forums (a premium product owned by a company or a brand) and Communities (a product designed for associations) merge to become Viadeo Groups.
This merge is the final stage of a series of product updates to the Viadeo Groups that have been rolled out over the past few months.
With our members giving us feedback that the distinction between forums and communities was unclear, we’ve now made this change to the product to make it simpler to discover great groups to meet or share discussions with other professionals on Viadeo.
Mathilde Caron, Product Manager for Viadeo Groups, says: “we wanted to simplify the usage of the website. We had two products with a very similar function but one was becoming old fashioned while the other one much more appropriate for the needs of our users. So we decided to delete the first one and adapt the second one in order to fit the needs of everyone and have only one comprehensive product.”
For companies, brands and associations there is still the option to upgrade the basic group to an official group with additional features and support. Find out more on the Viadeo Business Solutions site: http://business.viadeo.com.
As always, any comments or feedback about the changes are more than appreciated!
