New Menu Navigation Is Live In Beta

Hi everyone, in addition to our exciting news about launching Carbon, today we are also rolling out an incremental update to our menu navigation. This change intends to improve the experience for new users and make it easier to know exactly how to accomplish your goals on Shapeways as quickly as possible.



Changing the way a website or application is used is never easy on existing users. We recognize that once you know where something is located, it can be frustrating to have to relearn it all. Nevertheless we are confident that this update will be quick to figure it out and within a couple of sessions of using it, you will be very comfortable with it.

Key Changes

1) Marketplace search box has been moved next to the logo. Our search still has lots of room for improvement, but for new users looking to find the marketplace it should now be much simpler to find.



2) We have now grouped all menus together onto the right side of the page:

Hover on Start Making to Upload new files, have a 3D file designed for you, or learn best practices for working with Shapeways and the materials we offer.



3) Click on Business Solutions to learn more about how Shapeways can help power your 3D printing needs and speak with our sales team.

4) Hover on your avatar photo to access all pages related to your account, including your models, order history and store information (if relevant). We also have currently grouped some of the public pages like our Help Center and Forum links under this section.



5) Your cart has some minor tweaks, but should continue to function exactly as it did before.



Product Iteration

To set clear expectations, this navigation is a work in progress and represents a new way that the Shapeways development team will be working moving forwards, where we upload variants and iterations of all features (including exact copy, sizing, icons and more), see which performs best and continually tweak things until we feel they are fully optimized and performing well.

When we introduce new major changes we will continue to update everyone.

The end result should be a user experience that is simpler and clearer for all to accomplish their goals at Shapeways!

If you experience any bugs with this experience, please do let us know in this thread.

I am actually happy to hear that. Hopefully none of these changes are too disjointing and now you know we are making regular progress towards (hopeful) improvement. As a development philosophy, we are going to continue to make changes, hopefully faster and quicker as we get smarter about knowing what's working.

The "start making" is a hover, which expands Upload now function.


Or are you looking for an actual button in the top navigation of the website for uploading?

We're going to be iterating constantly, but doing so in a more thoughtful test-driven way. My goal is to help improve the business and that means measuring performance across the board, finding performance gaps, and thoughtfully introducing changes to address them.

To that end, there will be more change to come. Where possible, it will be incremental, iterative and not jarring. Most people will not even notice... But where necessary, we will do what we have to do to improve things and fix areas of the business and user experience we objectively determine to be broken. We will do what we can to communicate with our customers in these circumstances, to help avoid any confusion.