Ravelry: Profiles Redesign
Profiles on Ravelry aren’t so different from Profiles on any social site: they showcase fun about you (your favorite curse words, how long you’ve knit/crochet, your pronouns) and info about your activity on the site (the projects you’ve finished, the yarns in your stash, the groups you’ve joined). But after looking mostly the same for 12+ years, I started on a redesign that would allow Ravelry users a lot more creative expression.
An old Ravelry Profile. The small “Finished Objects” box on the right was the only area that showcased the user’s knitting/crochet projects.
So many social media profiles are so cookie cutter nowadays. While I didn’t want to totally blow up expected UX patterns (hi Jakob’s Law), I wanted to give Ravelers an opportunity to show off their creativity—both in the design of the profile itself, and in how their knitting and crochet projects were featured on the page.
The new Profile design, desktop.
The new Profile design, mobile.
I started by cleaning up the basic hierarchy of the page. There also hadn’t been a mobile-friendly version of Profiles, so I made sure that the structure of the page made sense across all device sizes.
A“Profile” is really two different page types: your own Profile, and someone else’s. The big differentiation is how a user can interact with these respective Profiles; you can edit your own, while you might friend, message, or block someone else’s.
I considered letting people go full MySpace in customizing their own Profiles, but worried about accessibility and information discoverability. Instead, I created a sort of ultra-cover photo called your “Canvas” that’s just that — a blank area at the top of your Profile. Users can change the shape, set it to automatically feature their most recently completed Project, decorate with bespoke graphics created by Ravelry artists for Pride and other holidays, or suck in photos from Instagram, Google, Flickr, or Unsplash. We’re also looking into third party tools for decorating your Canvas, like a KidPix/MS Paint-style art app or a prompt-based AI image generator.
A Canvas can also feature a Ravelry knitting/crochet project that you're working on. There are lots of settings so that the Canvas can automatically update as you add photos or finish projects, but still have control over what shows.
Opening the Canvas Editor
Setting the shape of your Canvas. There are currently 3, but we can always add more.
A quick toggle to let you preview how your Canvas will look in Ravelry's 3 modes.
From any device, you can preview how the Canvas will look on other devices.
Ravelry is a great supporter of the LGBTQIA+ community, so Pride flags are a built-in Canvas option.
The Ravelry gallery is a special set of images created by artists in the fiber community. We plan to commission more for holidays and other special occasions.
People use Ravelry to track and share the things they knit and crochet, so I wanted to make sure that people could showcase their work on their Profiles.
Professional user types also have profiles — pattern designers, yarn dyers, shop owners, etc. — so this area is a place for them to show off their wares.
Setting which knitting/crochet projects show on your Profile. (Also I really knit everything in those thumbnails! 😊)
This page shows only a slice of the work I did on new Profiles, so I recommend checking out the files on my Figma community profile!