Hi everyone,
We are making exciting and important updates to our user experience on Shapeways.com! We’ve been working for months and can’t wait to share it with you.
We had two major objectives:
- Remove friction from the experience to make our service easier to use
- Set a context for our services now and those rapidly coming that will enable the end-to-end experience surrounding 3D manufacturing to design, make, and sell
Here are some of the changes we are rolling out:
New Homepage
We have launched a new Shapeways.com. We optimized it for what people use the most (including: make a product, materials pages, contact forms). For shop owners, FYI the marketplace is still on the homepage. Notably, a large percentage of shoppers bypass the homepage and go straight to product pages from search rankings (so the homepage placement is less important than you might think).
New Logo and Design
As part of this, we redesigned our logo and brand colors, imagery, and typography. We wanted to bring the best of Shapeways forward: our name, our appreciation of design, and our respect and accessibility for audiences who might not otherwise have access to advanced 3D printing technology. And we also wanted to signal a change! A backdrop to increasingly showcase our customers’ brands, not Shapeways’ first; a differentiated look and feel for the industry; and a jumping off point to build out our platform story of design + make + sell. We started with the website and will be updating our old branding over the next few months.
New Creator Flow
To a small audience, we have been testing a new “creator flow” that moves the file upload time to 20 seconds instead what had previously been 20 minutes on average! It meant fundamentally rethinking all of the file optimization and more that were happening during that wait time. We had to reduce complexity on the backend, not just the front end. We also used this as an opportunity to simplify and clean up our overall experience to make it more intuitive. We are testing and learning now and will be rolling it out to more people as we keep improving it.
To achieve these ambitions, we are having to make some pretty significant changes. Net-net they make our experience better, but even change itself can be annoying when you are used to using something. Especially our most loyal customers who have been with us for years. We thank you for your patience as you learn through the change. We hope you are happy with the updates, but also appreciate your feedback here.
Greg Kress
CEO of Shapeways
What I love to see and I said this many times in the pass. That will help me the best. Is a home version of your automation check. Even though I run the file through several check programs like Nettfab and meshlab and they pop up 100% OK. It The automation program still finds flaws. Most of time it’s thin walls or find a divot in thin wires. Which I just use your fix thin walls and it and it fixes the problem. But again it’s the wait time. Then even when your program miss a thin wall and the manual check report say unprintable . I found a lot time If very tiny divot. In unseen location I done push prints and it prints fine. But yet I get lot kick back on hidden stuff that not visible to naked eye.
But that where I waste most my time uploading downloading the bugs the automation program finds.
Now if you release a home version. My wasted time will be cut by hours.
Thanks
Great job so far Greg!
I’m excited to see how you shape Shapeways over the coming months. I have trust in you! From what I’ve seen so far I’d most definitely hire you if I had a business that needed a great CEO.
I haven’t been in the forums much the last few months because of working on custom jewelry projects for clients nonstop. However, I’ll be back once things slow down on my end.
See ya around Shapeways town! 🙂
Coming back to the old upload times of some minutes can be a big improvement. My time tend more to 20 minutes now. Even in the example above, when there are failures reported that is extremely boring.
Hopefully we now get real improvements, because after having seen the headlines, I was thinking “damned, what will oncemore change on short notice”
The other two I don’t care, but what would be really needed is a proper search filter adding a shop as criteria, which can then be used by designers and customers as well.