Renewed People Page & Profiles on Arts CMS



We’ve redesigned the “People” page and profile posts to add new features based on feedback gathered from students, staff, and faculty, and site administrators across the Faculty of Arts.

Updates also include changes to the visual design of page elements to improve accessibility, readability, consistency, and ease of maintenance and will go live and be available for use on September 26, 2022.


Ability to toggle between grid and list view

In response to the desire to have multiple display options, you can now toggle between grid and list view. The default view is list view.

Grid view: We’ve updated the design to show more contact information (email, phone, office), and sizing has been reduced to improve readability and consistency.

List view: This view is less image-focussed and features a new “Profile Excerpt” field, which displays a preview of the profile content or a short bio. By default, the first 300 characters of the “About” field will be used if no excerpt is written.

  • You can include a custom excerpt/bio of up to 300 characters.
  • In response to the desire to align the display of faculty, staff, and graduate student pages, the list view will always display profile pictures. If a profile does not have a Featured Image, a default image will display.
  • For faculty and graduate student profiles, the list view will also display the assigned research areas from the filter dropdown.
  • All profiles in list view are now clickable, allowing you to view the profile in detail (similar behaviour in grid view).

Optional action

  • Add Featured Images to staff profiles
  • Add Profile Excerpts to all profiles

Subgrouping display for faculty profiles (archive view)

Faculty profiles will now be displayed by groupings instead of by alphabetic order and will be separated by section banners (horizontal lines) that display their corresponding faculty group. In response to the desire to show certain faculty groups at the top of the list (e.g. “Core Faculty”), you can now customize the order that faculty groups display on the People page.

Optional action

  • If you would like to customize the order of Faculty Groups, please reach out to us at arts.helpdesk@ubc.ca and we can support the implementation of this feature. Otherwise, Faculty Groups will display in the order they were created on the site.

New teaching field for faculty profiles

We’ve added a new field to allow faculty to include more information about teaching and courses. This field also displays the “View Courses” button to help minimize duplicated and out-of-date content (this was already an existing feature).

Optional action

  • Add additional information in the new teaching field

Smaller images

We’ve designed the profile images to be smaller in size, yet still be accessible and visually appealing. With this adjustment, we recommend featured profiles have a resolution of 270 x 319 pixels (6:7 aspect ratio) and be around 30 KB in size.

Optional actions

  • Review your profile images to see if any require resizing and resize the images to match the updated requirements

New pronouns, office hours, and leave fields

We’ve added new fields to allow for consistent display of information across profiles. You can now add your pronouns and office hours to your profile. In addition, the “On Leave Duration” field allows you to enter a start and end date to indicate when you will be away.

Optional actions

  • Add Pronouns, Office Hours, and Leave to profiles

Updated design of personal information

We’ve updated the design of profiles to display your basic personal information at the top of the profile, instead of the left side. Your basic personal information includes your name, contact information, unit title, and research areas.


Clickable email address and research areas (archive view)

Certain fields are now clickable from the People page (archive view) to improve usability. You can click email addresses to send an email with your email client. You can click on a Research Area to see similar profiles with the same research area.


Multi-select enabled for dropdown menus

We’ve enabled multi-select on the People page to improve the search and filter options. The updated design also makes it easier to view which search terms/filters are applied when viewing results.


Updates to mobile and tablet view

We have updated the display to make it easier to see section field information and to toggle between profile groups. For mobile, profile fields are now collapsible to improve the user experience on longer profiles.




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