Very observant of you! I do think the out of the box experience for changing an profile picture is a bit clunky, but we've had limited success improving it.
But it sounds like the kind of problem that you are only going to diagnose with some user testing to see what the sticking point might be. Perhaps grab a dozen people around the office who haven't used the community before and ask them to change their profile image and watch what they do?
If you haven't already, you might also consider allowing users to change their avatar by clicking on their profile image on their profile page. This is a much more intuitive experience than delving into My Settings. Feel free to checkout Workshop to see what we've done.
Good luck,
Jason
Sounds like maybe you need to have some people walk through the registration process and “watch” them do it (in person or via Webex) so you can see where the pain points are. I wouldn’t tell them exactly what you’re wanting them to do, so they’ll have no prejudice going in. Just tell them you’re looking at usability of setting up the accounts. In fact, I know someone who can help you with that (internally), Caroline.
Ah yes @CarolineS. I did think it was the default but then checked here on the Lithium community and was surprised not to see the option. Strange that the team here decided to remove it. Perhaps you could look at styling the icon though to make it clearer that users can interact with it?
Jason
My tuppence.
Just checked our flow and as long as the user uploads the image and completes the crop - even if they don't click save changes the avatar still appears once the image is approved. (pic 1)
If they don't bother cropping and just add the image then you get an orphaned image in the image folder. Could it be that some users are just not understanding the crop step? they just exit once they have clicked save changes (pic 2)
