Automated Drawings

Results

In the first 12 months, we helped users automatically gnerated more than 356,000 2D drawings containing:

1.46 million sheets
3.40 million views
10.84 million dimensions

Project History

Parts of this project originated from a developer "hack-a-thon" event.
The project was driven by leadership. As a result of seeing the "hack-a-thon", they asked for a "one-click" drawing creation solution.
This project was unplanned, there were no UX resources available, so the project was driven by delopment and product management for the first 6 months.
At the end of those first 6 months, leadership wanted something that was demonstrable for a main stage presentation at the companies annual customer event.
Once shown publicly at the customer event, it must be released in the software within 1 year.

Project Requirements & Goals

Automate mundane 2D documentation tasks by 80% for basic, prizmatic parts allowing users to spend more time on the value-add tasks.

Fit drawing automation into the existing drawing creation process.
Automate tasks with minimal to no manual editing by the user:
- Sheet creation
- View placement and rotation
- Place dimensions

Where did I start?

Developed a customer engagement plan.
Identified stakeholders and put together a stakeholder map.
Perform a UX audit of what was done during the 6+ months prior to UX involvement.

Customer Engagement Plan

Recruit 5 lighthouse customers - these are key customers that are identified with the product manager. They commit to giving feedback and testing the feature during the development process.
Create private Slack channel - to have easy, frequent communication with the lighthouse customers, a private slack channel is created which includes those customers and some key internal stakeholders.
Survey customers - for sensative information, our beta forum is leveraged to communicate with customers who are under NDA. For non-sensative information, surveys will be sent broader.
Drive discussions on beta forum - engage users on the beta forum by starting and monitoring conversations.
Plan for hands-on testing with customers - work with prodcut manager and the development team to identify when we can get working product to customers.

Stakeholder Map

UX Audit Results

The following are a few of the items that were identified during my UX audit of the work that was done prior to UX involvement.

Issue #1

Issue Summary:

The team accomplished an impressive amount of progress in the first six months. However, I noticed that there were too many exposed configuration options, which complicated the process significantly.

Resolution:

The team revealed all their coding efforts to maintain flexibility while operating without UX input. After extensive discussions with the team and our key customers, we discovered that most features would not require user modification. We pinpointed the necessary settings and made the other options accessible, streamlining the user experience by presenting only the essential choices.

Before

After

Issue #2

Issue Summary:

Based on my own testing and user feedback, the question of "how many sheets will be generated?" often arose. Users were certain about the 3D design they chose and that an automatic drawing would be created for them, but they were unclear on the number of sheets needed to represent that design.

Resolution:

The design has been updated, and the team has implemented a solution to calculate the number of sheets to be generated. This information is displayed in the "Create Drawing" UI, allowing users to see how many sheets will be automatically created before they execute the drawing generation.

Issue #3

Issue Summary:

While examining some automatically generated drawings, I noticed that certain dimensions were missing. After conducting further tests, I discovered I was unable to make them appear with the automation tool. This is more of a quality issue than a UX concern, but it significantly affects trust and had not been identified yet.

Resolution:

After collaborating with the development team, we discovered that they had set a limit on the number of dimensions that could be created. After additional discussions and validation with customers, we raised the limit and implemented a mechanism to allow for further increases if a user reaches it.

Customer Feedback & Quotes

Below is a small sampling of customer feedback and some quotes that we received during testing and validation efforts.

Customers mentioned the need to update multiple drawing easily after creation.
Customers encountered various designs where it was not fully documented (there were sheets missing).
Customers voiced performance concerns.
Customers requested the ability to pre-select the dimension recipe for each sheet type ahead of creation.

Regrettably, we could only provide customers with a very limited hands-on time to experience the capabilities before the code had to be finalized for release. Fortunately, we did not encounter issues that delayed the release. We managed to resolve a few reported issues, but most will need to be addressed in the next update.