Client: MakerBot Thingiverse
My Role: UI/UX Designer

In 2014 as part of the Thingiverse team I worked to bring some new features to the site focusing on new users to the community.

User Profiles
One area of the site we wanted to update was the User Profiles: streamline the look as well as give the user the ability to feature more content. We shrunk the cover photo and brought more focus to the content and user information. One awesome feature is the ability to search a user’s designs and more, which is not only great for visitors viewing a profile but also for the owners of the profile to search their own content more easily. One last bit we added was the ability to highlight one’s personality (what kind of user type a user associates with) and what printer is used.

New User Onboarding
Joining any community, especially a large one such as Thingiverse, can be a daunting experience. We wanted to simplify that experience with our first version of New User Onboarding. With 3 easy steps we guide users into creating and customizing their profile, showcase amazing creations on Thingiverse for them to collect for printing later, and also highlight some of the amazing talent we have on Thingiverse for them to follow and receive updates on their Dashboard from. One last fun feature: we noticed that new users don’t add their avatar immediately, so we decided to have some fun with this. If users associates what time type of user they are, a unique avatar for each type, which we created, would automatically display. This is only the first step toward making the site and experience all the better and more engaging for the growing number of 3D printing enthusiasts.

Comments
For a few years, Thingiverse commenting system was based on the Disqus platform. While this was a great service and helped quickly add comments to the site, it also limited what we could do with commenting and how it interacted with our mobile applications. We created a custom commenting solution with a simple and easy-to-read design that works well on the website as well as our mobile applications.

Mobile Friendly
Like all of Thingiverse, all three of these new features are fully responsive, ready for display on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.