Display avatars next to usernames instead of icons

[Huw Wilkins]

Currently when we display a username we also display an icon of a little person next to it.

The icon is not personal and does nothing more than convey that you are looking at a username. We currently gather user avatars and display them on the user's profile page. I think we should replace the current user icon with the user's avatar. This will help to personalise Launchpad and be a step toward making it feel a bit more collaborative.

[Jonathan Lange (jml)]

Very much agree. When fixing this, please check that the page load times aren't significantly affected.

[Julian Edwards (julian-edwards)]

On Friday 04 February 2011 14:44:41 you wrote:
> Very much agree. When fixing this, please check that the page load times
> aren't significantly affected.

Don't issue one database query per avatar required, you should be able to get
the librarian file aliases all in one go.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

I researched this in August 2010 when looking at memcache. We do have a problem in the PersonFormatterAPI. I do not appear to have sent the details to the lists, only the summary that showing a diversity of users kills page performance.

PersonFormatterAPI does a tremendous amount of work to look up an icon for users and teams. There are several stupid behaviours:
  * It looks up the icon for a user who cannot have an icon at this time.
  * Repeated displays of a user or a team are repeated lookups
  * Icons rarely change

I was pursuing a memcache solution to object formatters that would also support sane cache invalidation. An alternate solution would be to prepopulate the person object with icon, logo, and mugshot. We could also choose to denormalise the data since we expect the information to rarely ever change.

[Jonathan Lange (jml)]

Agreed, but I think there are also browser-rendering/roundtrip/sprite-related performance thingies to worry about. Wish I could be clearer.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

there are helpers to preload the icon data from the db already; that
aspect is solved. Agreed on the browser side that there are
performance implications there too.

[Huw Wilkins (huwshimi)]

Here's what my branch makes this look like.

[Julian Edwards (julian-edwards)]

I like it. You missed one in the subscription portlet though.

[Matthew Revell (matthew.revell)]

Wow, this is superb. It's clear I need to change my picture.

How have you handled the performance issues Rob and Jono mention above?