Typically when I tell people this I’m met with some form of these questions: “Why? Isn’t that really dangerous? Aren’t you scared of getting hit?”

Fair questions. I had to ask myself them today as I rode in 30 degree weather to the office and had one of my closer calls as a driver rolled through his stop sign on a neighborhood greenway while I must have been in his blindspot. We both braked hard, and my front wheel came to a stop within a few inches of his bumper with my heart rate elevated.

Speaking of which, that’s why I ride—to get my heart points. By bicycle commuting, I get 90 minutes of exercise at least four days a week. It has gotten to the point where not bicycling comes with a host of side effects: trouble falling asleep, restless legs, and feeling crummy.

So yes, bicycle commuting is risky. But like anything, you can manage your risk. I wear high visibility safety gear, use bright headlights and taillights, and ride a meandering route to utilize bicycle infrastructure and avoid traffic or bad intersections. 

Meanwhile people in the U.S. are 16 times more likely to die from heart disease than a motor vehicle collision, 72 percent of adults are overweight, only 24 percent get enough exercise, and “sitting is the new smoking.” 

Bicycle commuting is my way of managing those health risks and enjoying the mental health benefits of exercise. This morning I just grinned and waved at the driver who almost hit me.

As I rode away, I heard him roll down his window, groan and call out, “Man, I absolutely apologize!” Stay classy, sir.

To another 10 years of pedaling.

It was somewhere in a review of the various widgets and settings we have for showing users on the front end that I was reminded how unruly our core User Profile had become. Along with some of our third-party plugins, we had added fields to the profile throughout the years without considering the overall organization of the page.

The result is a page that is nearly 10,000 pixels tall on desktop with around 40 fields, leading off with the little used and even literally useless Personal Options. That’s not good when many of our customers’ sites show User Profile info on the front end and so does the newly redesigned LexBlog.com.

So after some discussion, we set our art director Brian Biddle to the challenge of making the User Profile pleasant to see and use again. I’ll let him speak to the details, but what he came up with and was refined by our team looks like this:

Using patterns from our Site Settings menu, Brian organized the fields into five tabs ordered by frequency of use and grouped by purpose: User Info, Contact Info, Biography, Subscriptions and Personal Options. Along the way we eliminated extraneous fields and made our labels, helpers and placeholders consistent with our other UIs. 

Redesigning the User Profile was just the tip of the iceberg (sorry Brian) because the project’s dev Angelo Carosio is actually replacing profile.php with our own page and accounting for all of the user actions. As Angelo said: “It’s like a giant box full of old Christmas lights that were just thrown together and are all wrapped around each other.”

But after much testing by Jared Sulzdorf and me, we’re nearing a release in time for the holidays.