Users Know Best-Part 2

By Louise Elliott

Most-needed capabilities in MCAD are being turned into new functionalities by developers.

This concluding article of this two-part series explores how MCAD developers turn user suggestions into software features. Click here for Part 1.—DE

Much has been said about MCAD software developers taking user feedback and working that communication into later versions of their various programs. But how do vendors turn client suggestions and needs—the primary drivers of “best practices”—into actual software features? Here’s how three MCAD companies identified and implemented these best practices.

“Over the years, SolidWorks has moved a great many people from 2D to 3D,” says Fielder Hiss, manager of product management for SolidWorks, “and while that is still a major goal of ours, almost all CAD users still lay out their concepts in 2D to see how components fit together and interact before getting down to detailed design.”

He describes the 2D layout practice as an outgrowth of the much-storied sketch on a napkin drawn by an engineer in the grip of inspiration. After speaking with a number of customers involved in machine and mold design, “such as Kimberly-Clark,” who had worked in 2D until recently, SolidWorks learned that they needed to start from scratch to complete a 3D design. Each wanted a tool that would leverage 2D work for 3D design.

“They really wanted to be able to do their 2D layouts more quickly, and then not have to start over again to create the detailed design,” Hiss says.

SolidWorks set out to provide such a tool, and the result can be seen in Sketch-Blocks, a new functionality in SolidWorks 2006. With the new tool, designers can lay out a series of 2D sketches and fit them together, or move them around in 2D to prove their design concepts. In the latter application, the profile of each 2D part can be extruded automatically into a 3D part or, if preferred, the whole design can evolve into 3D.

“Feedback on this functionality has been one of the most positive SolidWorks has ever had,” Hiss reports. “2D is familiar and comfortable for designers working on concepts, and now they can benefit from 3D very easily as well. We hear that a great deal of effort is being saved with the new functionality—though, of course, this varies from user to user. It certainly lets them move more quickly from concept to full design. Overall, companies are looking for process and time savings. They want to eliminate waste in both areas, and they like new ways to save time.”

Although customers tell Autodesk about features they think they want in CAD software, they sometimes are not able to articulate their desires well. “We find it very helpful to analyze what the customer is actually doing, and what problems they have,” says Andrew Anagnost, senior director of product management for the company. “Generally, these are process rather than product issues.”

To understand the underlying issues faced by Inventor users, Autodesk visits customers to see “a day in the life.” The new Functional Design tools in Inventor grew out of observing designers who often, when working, “stop to scribble on a piece of paper to figure something out and then go back to the modeling program to create geometry.”

Autodesk developers thought that it would be much more productive for designers to sketch out designs with the system instead of repeatedly stopping and starting the process over. “We found that customers spend a lot of time creating the same things—such as shafts and gears—over and over, resizing them for different designs,” says Anagnost. “If we could help them to enter their parameters—such as the load capacity, speed, and attachments—they would be able to generate such repeated geometry automatically.”

Functional Design does that. The user can now create functional requirements and get geometry back instead of sketching on paper. Anagnost says, “The result is available to them as a usable part of the overall design.” Designers using the new capability can start their design with a conceptual layout to which they can add functional requirements for some parts. This enables the automatic creation of a 3D model, from which in turn, 2D drawings can be created.

“Too often modeling programs force their users to make geometric decisions before they’ve made their engineering decisions,” Anagnost says. “To get away from situations where the modeling program breaks the designers’ thought processes, the software needs to blur the barrier between function and form.”

He believes that Functional Design fills a hole in customer design processes that needed to be bridged, and reports that feedback has been very positive, although the capability is very new.

PTC’s Behavioral Modeling for Pro/Engineer Wildfire was first introduced more than three years ago, and has continued to evolve. It makes the optimization capabilities of Pro/MECHANICA available to design engineers at the conceptual design stage. It affords the ability to evaluate a wide variety of ideas at the earliest stages of the design cycle, before finalizing any geometry.

“Designers can incorporate space constraints, maximize quality, and reduce material use,” says Michelle Leeds, PTC’s Pro/Engineer product manager. “Rather than forcing the engineer to compare and evaluate many iterations of a design, the software does it, and does it faster.”

The designer creates rough geometry and enters the goals and constraints for the design, and the software optimizes it. “For example,” says Leeds, “in designing a fuel tank for a car, the engineer can take the rough layout and put in constraints on size, weight, and the quantity of gasoline it needs to hold. Then, after indicating which parts of the geometry can be changed, he tells the software to modify the design.”

Behavioral modeling then performs a series of optimization runs—as many as necessary to achieve the goals entered—and when finished, the engineer can see a design that fits all the constraints and design requirements he stipulated. Usually viewed with a 2D sketch plane, the model used for behavioral modeling is actually a 3D design that can be detailed after optimization is complete.

“As behavioral modeling progresses for a variety of subassemblies in a product, the surfaces and sometimes the geometry change,” says Leeds. “Other designers working on other parts of the product need access to such changed designs. The program makes it possible for designers to publish the changed geometry and surfaces to other engineers, and the whole layout updates with each change for further sharing.”

Leeds reports that feedback has been very positive. Behavioral modeling takes a number of tedious, time-consuming tasks and makes performing them flexible. Together with assembly layout capabilities, users find that their design process goes much more quickly.

Given the feedback collected by SolidWorks, Autodesk, and PTC, it’s clear that basing product development on “best practices” pays off for users and vendors alike.

Contributing Editor Louise Elliott is a freelance writer based in California. Offer Louise your feedback on this article through by clicking here. Please reference “Best Practices, January 2006” in your message.

Autodesk Inventor
Autodesk, Inc.
San Rafael, CA

CATIA
Dassault Systemes
Paris, France

Pro/Engineer
PTC
Needham, MA

SolidWorks 2006
SolidWorks Corp.
Concord, MA

NX, NX I-deas Series, Solid Edge
UGS Corp.
Plano, TX