_{Please note: This is not a username search feature and is not designed to be anything similar to one. You want to find a friend you don't know the username of, then ask them in person or Google it!}

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One of the more common questions I see get asked either in my day to day hanging out in #devart, or my time volunteering in #help is how to find a person's page if you know their username. I feel that having to explain to someone new to the site that they have to manually enter the person's username and then to add deviantART.com is clunky and doesn't offer a smooth experience of the site.

This is also the case with long-time users of the site- we also have to either manually type the URL or flick through our friends list if we don't want to enter it.

I therefore propose this addition to the search page: an intelligent top box to the page that appears if the search query also happens to be a username. I went through a few designs for this, one of which ( [link] ) included a few of the user's recent deviations and more information, but I felt a more minimal approach worked best as it saves on screen space and doesn't push the search results too far down the page.

I also considered what should and should not appear- I guessed the most common shortcuts from what I personally use the most, but I also didn't want to make it too complicated. Having items like +Watch or Join Group would require extra code and functionality, when all those options are only one more click away if the user continues on to the Profile/Group Home Page. The buttons displayed change depending on what is appropriate.

Other possibilities that the dA Staff could implement are custom designs for special pages and accounts that have their own styling and subpages. An example I mocked up is for the deviantWEAR page- using it's distinctive green text on a dark background, as well as adding the appropriate Shop link as well as the latest special offer or news item. This could extend to other areas of the site such as the prints shop with it's current orange colour scheme, or having designs specific to a current major site Contest with links to the contest information and entries.

This could even extend even further but I feel it might drive our poor search feature to madness with all the extra queries! Possible issues that I could think of include the fact that common search parameters also correspond to actual usernames on the site. An (admittedly poor) example would be ~breakfast, which is (probably) a relatively well-used search term, but ~breakfast hasn't been active on the site for a few years. I can't imagine this happening too often as the vast majority of single-word searches would correspond to old or abandoned accounts, but having ~cat pop up with its blank icon every time it is searched for (I would guess frequently) would be incredibly annoying. A solution to this would be to check whether the user has been active within say, the past 3 months to decide whether to have the box appear.

Hope you like the idea and the design execution, if this has been suggested before please do not get all butthurt. I had a good search through the suggestions gallery and didn't find anything particularly similar. However if there is one already then I will quite happily pop a link right here: [ ... ... ]

Love to hear your views, whether it be on the concept or the design mockup? I think it's a great idea and would love to see it implemented.

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Many thanks to everyone involved (see below) for the DD suggestion! Response journal is here.