Look, I love Ravelry.

But the rollout of their site redesign should wind up as a case study about tech, accessibility, branding, and community.

Beta testing with a mere 100 people, on a site with over 8,000,000 registered users, was a mistake.

Having that group of beta testers come from a subset of people who checked a ticky box in their settings some time previously that a bunch of people don't even know about was a mistake. (SAMPLING BIAS)

It seems that no effort was specifically made to include folks with vision problems in this group. Mistake.

It seems that there wasn't an effort to include a wide variety of platforms and browsers - the new site literally renders in DIFFERENT COLORS depending on what you are using.

The font is hard to read. The icon that now means "forums" is a speech bubble with the delete symbol used in copyediting. Some of the other icons used are now more feminine-coded.

Also it is unclear whether there was a plan to deal with if the rollout failed (which, given how many issues have been raised, I'd argue it has). It is going to take time to fix all of this.

Like... when people are reporting nausea, migraines, swimming text, on your new site? Something is wrong.

That all being said, I have seen people personally insulting Cassidy and Livia (the folks who designed it), deadnaming Cassidy, and generally being assholes.

Yes, they fucked up. DEADNAMING, PERSONAL INSULTS, ETC. ARE STILL WRONG AND PEOPLE NEED TO NOT.

There are also a shitton of bugs beyond what I have said here

There were also a bunch of changes that made sense, like where certain features got moved.

Also the only announcement I saw was a post in a single forum that just mentioned a "surprise" and included a video with no sound or text, but was just an animation of the animals in hot air balloons that are now on the login page.

(A ton of Ravelry users do not even know what the forums are or are for.

I watched the video and did not suspect the redesign at ALL.)

(So both the new design AND the announcement are inaccessible to a lot of folks.)

(Also the branding totally changed. Which will be interesting, because I was literally on an indie dyer's site this morning, that used the old Rav logo, the stylized ball of yarn, as a link to their presence there, right next to the Facebook and Twitter logos)