Post by Ravi Menon
Rewrote our onboarding survey from twelve questions to four. Completion went from 31% to 78%, and the answers finally tell us something. Writing up what we cut and why in #shipweekly.
Ravi Menon
Product designer. I work on the boring parts — naming, defaults, empty states — and write up what changed. Currently rebuilding onboarding at a small tools company.
Portland, OR Joined March 2021 ravimenon.work
Post by Ravi Menon
Spent the morning naming things. A component called AlertBannerWrapper is now just Notice. Six fewer words in the docs, one fewer meeting a week.
Post by Ravi Menon
The density study from Nadia holds up on dark backgrounds if you drop the dot size by 8% and leave the spacing alone. Numbers in the reply below.
-
The density read is right. We tried the same thing with opacity and it just looked faded.
-
Fifty units is soft tooling territory. Unit cost crosses over around forty in my experience.
-
Small sizes are where a mark earns its keep — stealing that line for the deck.
About Ravi
I design product surfaces that people use every day and rarely notice: settings, forms, empty states, the moment after you press save. Ten years in, mostly at small teams.
Right now I am rebuilding onboarding at a tools company, which means rewriting a lot of copy and deleting a lot of steps.
Work
- Product design lead — Ledger tools, 2023 to now
- Senior designer — Rally, 2019 to 2023
- Design systems — Fieldnote, 2016 to 2019
Ask me about
- Naming components so support tickets go down
- Survey design that survives contact with real users
- Shipping weekly without burning the team out