Purely a wishlist item to make things nicer and prettier, but the plaintext username-only fields displayed in tracker items lack some interactivity (and prettiness). I would suggest:
- Full human-readable name by default (rather than username)
- Tiny version of the square-cropped user avatar (if any, or if a gravatar or libravatar is associated with the email address) shown before the name, otherwise maybe the initials inside a colored square as the fallback; alternatively, if space is constrained because there are too many names (ex: more than 10 individuals) it could show only the avatars and/or initials "fallback avatars". The avatars-only representation is also often the most space-efficient representation for kanban boards' cards. "Avatars besides names" are also often used in @ user mentions autocompletion.
- When hovering the mouse over individuals' names, it should reveal a user profile popover card like Discourse does (for some nice examples on Keagan's name in this thread or Matthew Miller's name in this thread)
- When hovering the mouse over a group, it would reveal the description of that group and all the users present in that group (using their avatars and/or text, depending on the configuration of the above features), which could be interactive as well)
Avatars should be auto-cropped to a square aspect ratio (whether it is actually displayed as a square, rounded square, or circle), because that's pretty much the standard... though users could also elect to have a widescreen decorative banner for their profiles, like social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Discourse, YouTube) allow.
All optional of course, but I would tend to think they would be good default settings to have. And not only would this allow having more information at the fingertips, it could also open up the door to gamification / badges of honor / etc. being at the forefront and "part of the workflow", whether for public community sites or for intranets.