Add Skills Playing on ApnaCircle (Part I)

After a few very unique features like the profile timeline (very much talked in the media as a career visualization feature), online contact cards build and share and a smart feature in the smart news; ApnaCircle.com is getting ready to launch a very unique and interesting way to add skills on your profile. The feature itself hasn't been officially announced by ApnaCircle yet. Seems like they are in a testing mode but our team was able to sneak past in what currently is still under the cloud and get a glimpse of this interesting feature.


Skills Welcome

This is how the Welcome page looks like. There is also a menu bar on top of the page and a pretty empty footer line; both not shown in the above image. The footer doesn't need any space in this post for now, however the menu is detailed in a section below in this post. The welcome page is pretty simple, nicely explained and put down.


Skills Menu
The menu present on all the pages looks like this. There is also a site logo there but it looks 

like that still needs some work so we will leave it there and wait till its ready to be put down on this post. Getting back to the menu, as you see here, pretty simple and straight options that we explain next. The rest of the top bar contains some other links, we will come back to soon.
Play
Got confused on what this is doing here? ApnaCircle introduces skills where you add skills to your profile for your benefit but (as explained on the welcome screen image) where your contacts also benefit by being in your circle of network. We weren't able to see this page as the eligibility still remains to be fulfilled. But from the explanations from the welcome page, it

looks like that for the skill chosen you are prompted to vote in between your contacts (from a pack of 3 at a time). So for a particular skill that you are playing for you choose a contact that you think is the most skilled from the pack of 3 presented to you. The more you play the more points you may get (as shown in the right side of this image). Ideally, the person you voted for should also be benefited in terms of his tally of points. No way to know currently as we ourselves were not able to play the game. We are a bit curious about the big ? that you see in a dotted circle on the top right of the image. Our guess is that its a place holder for the position(Rank) that you may hold for that particular skill. Quite a few of the text that you see here is in French. That may be since the feature is still in testing mode, plus ApnaCircle' parent company as you may recall from our other post is Viadeo, which is based out of France. Our chrome translator failed us for once here. Although we are sure the age will pretty soon be available in English.
Skills

This is the page where you add your skills.  As you see in our case, there were already some skills available. Well, they seems to have been picked up from the Keywords that we have in our profile. So, yes  good way to use some already existing data and that also means that you should start cleaning your Keywords as you soon will have to deal with this feature we are describing.

As you start tying in to add your skills, the application provides suggestions based on your input and we got a feel of the Google home page. The auto suggestions mention the skill names and (may be) the number of people already having that skill in their profile. Again, a very nice way to make things easier for users. You also have some suggestions already lined up on the right side of the page. Just a click on the plus sign adds it up.
Each block of a particular skill is nicely laid out. With a text area to specify the details you may want to add to that skill. Which in turn, seems like, will be helpful once your contacts start voting for you. And there again, the big ? sits there, cementing more our hunch that it will be used as your rank placeholder. There is one more interesting thing in here that we will let you to pick and wonder about. 
Ranking
Feel free to check the rankings for one and all of your skills that you have in your profile.

We still have some work to do on displaying any data on this page. But here on your left is how it will display initially. You may choose the skills from the drop on the top of the page. This drop will be available on nearly all of the internal pages that you access from the top menu bar.
You also, will have option to see the Ranking from either only your contacts or all the site users.
A couple of useful links sit at the bottom right corner of the page. Once in you may get the help and tips from there.
Vote
Ahh and we hate to tell you that we still are looking to get inside this page as well :(

Here on this page you will be able to see who voted for you and may be more things!

The other blocks and placeholder are pretty much the same as the other pages. So, we will leave you with the image here. Take notice of the targets that the application gives you: "Next badge in 3 votes" 
Okay lets make once more hunch, seems you will get these kind of small goals on most of the pages here. This of course s a good way to increase the user's interactivity and let them go on and on. These small goals will mean user will want to continue sing the feature and also come back to chase them; both ways increasing the site' interactivity and user stay.


More Menu
Apart from this, like we said earlier, there are 2 more menu items. One for the language and the other for a few more items. The language one you are already familiar with from our 

profile timeline post, so we omit that one here. The other user options includes; Preference, Help and Logout. Excuse our translation here, but like we said the pages are still in French so we couldn't help more.
The Logout that you see as the third sub-menu just takes you out of this Skills feature. Once you click on it, you will be back on ApnaCircle' Dashboard. We still are unclear on why they chose to name the link as Logout, since this feature seems pretty much part of teh main portal; at least as of now. We will be keeping an eye on this for sure! 
The Help is a FAQ page, where as usual you will be able to check for some basic start up questions that you may have based on your initial interaction with the feature.
The Preference menu is the most interesting one here, as you may see in the image next. Here you authorize the application that it may use the data this  

features collects about you to put you in some sort of a rank with the head hunters on the portal. This is very useful for all job seekers out there. So pay all the attention here.
Also, mentioned is the on-off feature which when switched on (like in the image here), lets the application put some posts on your dashboard (for your contacts to view) about your activity with this feature. Smart move again!


The Badges, Finally!
Ok, we talked about a big ? and some badges. So here they are!
We found this somewhere and this is how we came to figure out the ApnaCircle Skills feature.

Wherever they do ;), this is how they display. As you see for obvious reasons, we have to grey out a few things here. The colored circles are the badges that we have been talking about all through this post. A maximum of 3 badges show up and the rest are hidden only to be shown on the click of View all of their skills link visible near the bottom of the image.
The section although small is pretty nicely detailed and accompanied by the small colored stand out images. we will show how soon how the 1st and 2nd rank badges look like, but as you may have guessed, they are appropriately colored :).
Also detailed is the number of recommendations that a user may have received for a particular skill (greyed here) for which the respective badges have been earned by the same user.
Right below is the link to the ApnaCircle Skills page.

And like we promised here is the badge for the 2nd spot. Seems pretty much a silver medal is it? Well it ought to be since you are playing a game here and its pretty much obvious that the badges be what they really are, medals. Bronze, Silver and yes the 

precious gold. Looking at their sizes they are nicely draped in metallic colors and well shaped. There are a few things to figure out yet on the application's logic part on how it decides to push a user up the ranking. That obviously will be once we start making ourselves more familiar with the feature. We already are excited to try it out in its entirety once we have an official word on the feature. Hopefully that will be some time soon!

Our Views
The feature, we have said it time n again in this post, is very unique and interactive. This is a good way to keep the user addictive to the site and also make sure user inputs the profile data with some serious thinking. If you think from a job seeker perspective, we would like to be in the top 10 if not in the top 3 for a particular Skills rankings. User will find it easy to get adapted after an initial feel. We are sure there would be competition in the network with people always making sure to stay on top of other users in their circle. The application will need to be fast and a quick publisher. We are yet to find out if the badges earned will display somewhere on the public profile. Recruiters will find it a informative feature as well, since the head hunting will get some tips based on the tips. However, how the data flow will be to and from Recruiters will only be seen once the feature is open for all.

A few of the things that we noticed (although we know its still in the testing mode):

1. The ability for anyone else out of the development team to sneak into the feature should have been taken care of. We are not sure how many already have seen the feature when they are not intended to. With the application being only in French this is just going to put off the user, no user appreciates a feature not yet ready being shown to him/her, and this is a dangerous bug!
2. The Logout, as we pointed out earlier, only throws you out of the feature to the main Dashboard, we think it should have been a different flow; or may be the label should have been different.
3. The footer looks really left alone. It is as if that part of the page hasn't been noticed by the developers. Or may be that they are confident enough on the feature that the user will not feel like scrolling down. But still, there is enough space out there that could be utilized.
4. We will wait for the feature to open for all and see how user reacts to this one. There is some time as the text will need to be available in English and some work on the header logo part. Whatever and whenever, don't forget that it was here that you got the first glimpse of the feature ;)

Happy Crunching or rather for this one, Happy Adding Skills Playing on ApnaCircle and don't forget to vote for us once you start on this!!