Ravelry: User Feedback Overhaul
Client
Ravelry, the internet’s home for knitters and crocheters. I was their solo designer for 5 years.
Problem
Until I joined Ravelry, user suggestions and feedback were collected almost exclusively via public forums on Ravelry. This presented 3 issues:
Forum users skewed heavily toward super users who’d joined the site in its earliest days. Their experience of using Ravelry was very different from a newer or more casual user.
The public nature of forums resulted in a lot of groupthink, and new users were expected to read an unreasonable amount of old documentation before making suggestions.
Suggestions and feedback were therefore coming from a very, very small percentage of active users.
Solution
I created a feature beta testing feature called “the Swatcher.” Read more below…
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.