Tinkercad is a free app for 3D design, electronics, and coding used by millions of students and creative innovators worldwide. I designed new public profile and account settings pages to help people better show off their designs and engage with each other.
I was the sole UX designer on a small Agile team that included front-end and back-end developers, QA, a product manager, and an engineering manager. I created mockups, gathered feedback, iterated on designs, and worked with the team to ensure a smooth launch.
Time: Public profile designed in mid 2023 and launched later that year. Profile settings and social links designed Fall 2024 and launched Spring 2025.
Problem to solve
Both the user profile and the profile settings pages were outdated and needed a refresh. The old profile settings page didn’t make it clear which information was publicly visible and didn’t scale responsively. The old public profile had old design cards and a layout that wasted a lot of page real estate. When viewing your own profile you were also able to see all of your private designs which seemed confusing since the profile was not showing how other people see you.
In addition, we also wanted to add a new feature to allow people to add social links to their profiles. We noticed that people had been resorting to using their About text field area to mention their social handles and we wanted to provide a more visible method which we hope will encourage people to engage with each other more.
Process
The redesign for the public profile pages started with my own heuristic evaluations. I took a deep look at the pages that we had and noted all of the opportunities for improvement. Then I created new designs and presented them to internal stakeholders for feedback and buy-in. I received an overwhelmingly positive response and we were able to move forward with the refresh fairly quickly.
The project to add in the new social links was a bit more involved because there were a lot of implementation details to discuss and decide. We decided to provide a finite list of pre-vetted social platforms that focused on making and opted not to allow custom URLs for the safety of our younger users. We also took the opportunity to redesign the entire profile settings page, which allowed us to clean up a lot of old code but also expanded the scope considerably due to nuanced views and actions we have for different user roles.
Solution
Profile settings:
• Separate the information that relates to the public profile from the rest
• Clarify the public view status and when a profile user is in safe mode
• Make fully responsive so that settings can be adjusted from any device
• Add new social links fields for people to link their other accounts and gain visibility
New public profile:
• Move about text to the top, allowing designs to span full width below
• Update cards and filter styling to copy the components used throughout rest of site
• Remove private designs so that the profile reflects how other people see of you
• Add new social links section below About text to encourage engagement
Challenges faced
One of the biggest challenges with this project was the large portion of our users who are students. We had to constantly find a balance between promoting user agency and ensuring student safety.
Our final implementation has lots of protections in place to ensure the safety of our youngest users - if you’re logged in with Safe Mode enabled then you can’t add About text or social links to your own profile and you can’t view that information on others’ profiles. If you’re a parent or a teacher, you have the ability to moderate the information your students add to the site and can edit or restrict them as needed.