Ravelry: User Feedback Upgrades
Suggestions and feedback from users makes Ravelry what it is; Ravelers are extremely enthusiastic about the health and success of the site, and happy users are our main KPI (as opposed to high earnings or growth).
But until I joined Ravelry in 2018, user suggestions and feedback were collected almost exclusively via public forums on Ravelry. As the team’s first UX designer, I saw 3 issues with this:
Forum users skewed heavily toward super users who’d joined the site in its earliest days. They’d been “along for the ride” as Ravelry grew bigger and more complex, so their experience of navigating the site was very different from a newer or more casual user.
The public nature of forums resulted in a lot of groupthink. New/casual users who made suggestions were often bullied by longtime users, who expected them to read through an unreasonable amount of old documentation before chiming in.
Suggestions and feedback were therefore coming from a very, very small percentage of active users.
So, we made 2 big changes…
The new flow for sending in suggestions on Ravelry.
The first was to make a dedicated, private “Suggestion Box” feature. Users could write in suggestions that went directly to me, which I then organized and prioritized in Github (as of this writing, I’ve been experimenting with using AI to surface the most-requested features). No one had to worry about their suggestion being publicly belittled, and the suggestion box was placed in an area of the site that was easy for everyone to access. We saw a huge uptick in suggestions submitted by new/casual users, and people who’d never before posted in the forums.
Gathering suggestions via Doorbell.io, then organizing it into Github tickets
We also changed how we gathered feedback about new features. I created a function called The Swatcher, where we could beta test new features by rolling them out to diverse subset of Ravelers. Users who got access to a swatch had a dedicated area to provide feedback, which we used to make adjustments. Once the feature had been “swatched” and rolled out to the entire site, we often added a section to the Suggestion Box so that everyone could provide feedback on that particular feature for a period of time.
The Swatches page. There’s been an Easter egg setting to put a strip of bacon on the bottom of the site since its earliest days :)
Trends in the feedback and suggestions quickly appeared, and we were able to implement updates big and small that benefited a much larger percentage of users.
Some thumbnails for various features we’ve tested. In knitting and crocheting, “swatching” is the practice of making a small test square of fabric. If I’m about to make a sweater, I’ll knit several swatches with different needles and yarn combos to see which I like best.