I used to double-click on user names to view the profiles, but it seems like that was removed recently. I wanted to provide some feedback that the feature was useful, and the UI is a bit more confusing now, because double-clicking now just opens and closes the profile, and some users might not figure out that they have to click on the 2nd avatar to view the profile.
With double-clicking, users who click on the username or smaller avatar multiple times out of frustration will still end up on the profile page. (That’s how I discovered it.)
I just installed Posthog.com on my main forum as an experiment. One of the things it detects is “rage clicks” (repeated clicks on a single element).
I saw a first rage click within 30 minutes, and it looks like the issue mentioned above. Someone repeatedly clicked on a username, but they couldn’t get to the profile page and left the site without making it there.
I think it’s hard to discover how this works, because it isn’t intuitive to see a link on a page (the username) and then have to click in two different locations on the page to get to the destination (the username and then the card). There isn’t a visual indication that the username is a toggle and not a link. I’ve “rage-clicked” on it myself before, and I’m pretty familiar with using Discourse sites.
I thought the old double-clicking behavior was good. If a user clicks once, it opens the card. If they click again, it closes. If they double-click, they go to the user profile page.