You might have noticed some changes on Threadloop, and we're very excited to tell you about it - and for you to try it all out!

For a while now, we’ve been feeling very restrained by our navigation. On desktop we had a sidebar, and on mobile we had a somewhat quirky dropdown style navigation. Both with a lot of limitations.

Whenever we made a new section or feature, it was very hard impossible to find a place for it, and we were quite constrained when it comes to available screen space.

This lead to a lot of weird navigational patterns where you had to hunt down links, or even scroll in the navigation on some devices. Not good.

On top of that, it’s not really great to have the main mobile navigational areas at the very top of the screen (harder to reach), so we’re moving towards a more flexible and accessible navigation.

With our new design, we can now include a lot more links so it's easier to find what you're looking for.

Overview
Small screens now have a bottom nav bar, with five main links (of which three open up with more options)

Home - front page of Threadloop / your dashboard
Patterns - pattern library
Organize - all your stuff! Projects, fabrics, notions, roulette, measurements, stats, wishlist, saved, bookshelf, consolidated to buy and to do lists
Explore - Community pages like shared projects, pattern lists, discussions and challenges, the activity feed and members page, links to browse designers and publications, as well as the guide and news.
Me - Your settings and a link to your public profile

You will still have easy access to your notifications and light/dark mode toggle at the top right, as well as a brand new global search (more on that next).

On desktop, it's very similar to mobile, so it feels familiar when you switch between small and big screens. The only noticeable difference is that Projects gets its own place on the nav bar because there's a bit more space. We've also included some small descriptions for all the pages, to make it easier to find what you're looking for, and discover features you haven't used yet.

Our intention
We know this might take some getting used to, but our hope and intention is that this will be much better for most people, and more flexible in the long run. We want to be able to grow Threadloop and add new sections and features - it would be a shame to be limited by the navigation! 

We hope that it doesn't take too long to get familiar with these new changes, and that this new navigational system makes Threadloop easier and more delightful to use.

Another huge new feature is the global search. You will find it wherever you are on Threadloop in the top navigation (indicated by a magnifying glass). The global search lets you search through most of Threadloop: patterns, projects, fabrics, notions, discussions, pattern lists, designers, publications and the guide. 

To make this happen, we've had to change out some of our simple search engines that we previously used for pages like Fabrics, so most things now use the same advanced search engine. As a result of this, the fabric search should be a lot better now and let you do more fuzzy searches.

There will probably be some fine tuning needed to make this search work like you expect, so please let us know if you have any feedback or ideas for the global search.

You can filter your results by picking the pages you'd like to see results from. For example, if you know you're looking for patterns, you can click on the Patterns filter at the top:

If you're not sure what you want to work on next, you can now use the roulette for patterns and fabrics, in addition to projects. The roulette will pick a random item from your stash or projects, so you can turn your indecision into a little game. There are some simple filters so you can make sure you're getting a random result you're actually interested in. For example, for the fabric roulette you could say that you only want to see cotton knits.

There isn't a huge deal to tell you about here, but we did a little redesign of the settings page to make it easier for you to find the settings you're looking for. 

Review stats - which patterns have you reviewed?
We've included lists at the bottom of your review stats that show you which patterns you've written reviews for, and which ones you're yet to write.

In addition to this, we've done quite a few little tweaks all over the platform, so if you notice any new quirks or bugs, let us know! Big changes like these are often accompanied with some errors (but we hope there's not many!)


As always, thank you so much to our Plus members who's support makes this all possible.