SolidWorks 3DContentCentral (3DCC) Redesign

The SolidWorks 3DContent Central (3DCC) website -- a model exchange service that allows vendors to post models of their inventory for mechanical/industrial designers to download and use in their designs -- had been largely untouched for about 5 years and it was starting to really show. The original site's visuals were dated, and the features were scattered and unfocused after organic adjustments over the years.  A renewed interest in updating the site, along with a new business model was proposed in the spring of 2014, and finally in June of 2015, a new redesigned 3DCC was launched!

Yours truly lead the UX of the redesign. Although I was no longer with the company when the redesigned site finally launched, the UX design was largely completed by the time I left and it's great to see how far the product team was able to take it by the launch.

Here's a quick look at the Before

Original 3DCC Home Page
Hard to focus on what was important and where to start

Original 3DCC Find Content Page
A lot of entry points to finding content

There was a lot of work to be done, so the work was phased into 3 sections. The initial phase was to revamp the home page and general styling, revise the backend to support the new business model offering, and showcase why users and vendors should be part of the 3DCC community.

After I completed the wireframes of the main areas we could affect in the first phase, I worked with a visual designer to get the branding and color palette into place to support our new initiative.

Here's a look at the After

New 3DCC Home Page
Highlighting "Search" as the main way for designers find parts to use in their design
Sponsorship is clean and clear
Updated the overall look and feel to include the proper branding logos and color palette

As the page scrolls, the header and footer are fixed with Search persistently accessible

New 3DCC Find Content Page
Only the header and footer were adjusted in this phase to accommodate the timeline

New 3DCC Subscription Benefits Page
The navigation / site information architecture was completely reworked into the new header navigation

New 3DCC Business Model Page
Simple at a glance view of the different offerings

New 3DCC Publisher's Catalog Dashboard
High level view of your content publishing status by catalogs (publishers can have more than one)
The content manager (grid of content controls in bottom left) was not redesigned in this phase

New 3DCC Usage Report
The new feature and main selling point of the new business mode
Publishers will get a detailed view of who has downloaded their models (leads)
The report is searchable and sortable, allowing publishers to cross sell if the lead has downloaded other models
The amount of detail publishers see will depend on their subscription level

Overall the relaunch is fairly successful. We brought the website up to modern standards and provided a wealth of new functionality that publishers would (hopefully) find valuable and be willing to spend more money on a higher subscription level than before. 

What's New in SolidWorks Enterprise PDM 2015 - Copy Tree

Yours truly revamped the UI for an existing feature of SolidWorks Enterprise PDM - Copy Tree. In SolidWorks ePDM 2015, the UI was revamped, cleaned up, and given a brand new filter capability that allows users to locate the file they want in the fastest time possible. 

A more in depth post will appear at some point, for now, a repost of the original blog on SolidWorks by Mike Fearon follows below. 

http://blogs.solidworks.com/solidworksblog/2014/09/solidworks-2015-manager-showcase-whats-new-in-epdm.html

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The SOLIDWORKS annual release starts with feedback provided by you, our community, and finds its way to the people responsible for including your request in our annual release. For SOLIDWORKS 2015, we wanted to introduce you to some of the people responsible for the new features and let them describe their favorite tools included in the 2015 release. Today’s SOLIDWORKS Expert is Kurt Lundstedt, Product Manager, EPDM

Kurt on what’s new: Copy Tree has been available in SOLIDWORKS Enterprise PDM (EPDM) for many years, but in 2015 the user interface has been completely redesigned making it much easier to create new product structures.  As we all know, many companies reuse existing designs to make new ones.  These new designs often share many of the same sub-assemblies and components with the prior version as well as incorporating new designs.  That’s where Copy Tree comes in handy and in 2015 there are many new features that make it much easier to find and select the files to be reused or copied.  Some of the new features include:

• Selection filters based on file type and/or any text string in the file name or file property can make a large product structure easy to work with.
• Thumbnail previews for SOLIDWORKS files give the user an instant visual clue of the file they are looking at.
• Excluded folders so users don’t mistakenly make copies of standard library components
• Easy folder and file editing dialogs including searching for destination folders

The driving force behind this feature was customers telling us, both via direct interviews and submitted enhancement requests, that the interface was cumbersome to work with when working with large assembly structures. Another thing we discovered is that it was difficult for users to know what file they were looking at because most companies name their part and assembly files with a part number. Adding thumbnail previews provides users with quick visual feedback so they can make more accurate decisions.

Design Casualty: The Weather

Like many people out there, I haven't been to a weather website in quite some time because we have apps on our smart phones that tell us what we need to know on a daily basis. Sometimes when I turn on the news I might still see some weather forecasts reported, etc. Mostly things are unchanged as far as I can tell from an information presentation perspective. A large map of the country with temperature numbers and little weather icons. It's a format we all know and are familiar with.

Today, I was browsing my Facebook feed and saw a scary map a meteorologist friend posted around the Chicago area. Something about the Bears game. It got me thinking I should find out what the rest of the week's weather is going to be like. I went to the Weather Channel website (weather.com) looking for the forecast for the week.

My eyes were assailed with the following, which was what was visible above the fold.

I literally double checked the URL I typed thinking I mistype and landed on one of those domains that is being squatted by advertisers. Is this really the Weather Channel website? What happened??

While I realize some of the elements of the page might be overly saturated for the purposes of alerting people to really alarming situations with regard to the tornado and the typhoon, there are several major issues with what I'm seeing.

1) While I understand alerts are necessary, neither of the red highlighted issues (tornado and typhoon) are anywhere near the 3 locations I have saved previously nor my current location if the website is doing any IP detecting, therefore these alerts are NOT immediately relevant and do not deserve such high alarm status

2) I know everyone has jumped on the minimalist bandwagon between Metro / Win 8 and iOS 7. But it doesn't mean it is good design to just use the colors that they are using! That medium blue color being used in the top bar is now pervasive in lots of applications. It's a color that "vibrates" and causes strain on my eyes. It doesn't provide sufficient contrast against white text or as text color on white background. It probably doesn't work with black that well either. It is in the middle and that's usually bad. I wanted to make sure this isn't just personal opinion so I went to photoshop and put the screenshot through the two red-green colorblindness filters and got the following. 

Photoshop Deuteranopia Filter (Red-Green Colorblindness)

Photoshop Protanopia Filter (Red-Green Colorblindness)

No question, that blue provides horrible contrast and should not be perpetuated! Look at how well the original Weather Channel logo blue is providing contrast. 

3) The unlabeled "blocks" right in the center beneath the top banner area has 4 highlight stories (I presume, there's no label). And between "You Won't Believe What Bit Her!" and "Rare 'Unicorn' Rediscovered" and the "play" icons that look like they were either pushed onto the next line because the headline was too long, or the page didn't finish rendering and the label was missing, I was convinced that I was on an advertisement page or the Weather Channel website had been hacked. There's no way that a serious weather website would look so much like the local tabloids, right? What does either one of them have to do with weather?!

I would say the same about the "WATCH: Elk Doesn't Do Photos" caption, except that one I knew to be an actual event since I've seen that on the local news recently. But it STILL has no relation to the WEATHER.

4) There really is an ad prominently taking up about 15% of the screen and it is about shopping? For goodness sake, it would at least make more sense if it was trying to sell me a tornado survival kit!

I'm just so disheartened by the way so many major websites, programs, applications, and more has decided to just jump on the new minimalist design bandwagon and take colors directly from iOS or Win8 without thought. Everything being "flat" there's no clear hierarchy and everything is assailing your eyes the same time. Additionally, there's irrelevant content, inappropriate alerting, and much more that over stimulates the visual senses instead of keeping it simple, as originally intended by the minimalist approach. 

I came looking for the weather, and I am left asking myself why didn't I just use one of my apps to get the 5 day forecast instead. It would have saved me from this. 

Experiencing adidas miCoach: Discovering Workout Trends

The long weekend was good for catching up with friends, sleep, and…. workouts! The weather was pretty good on a few days and I went out to explore new grounds and new neighborhoods. I found that the bike path was a great place to run because it was well shaded with lots of trees and a nice breeze came through frequently too.

I got a few workouts in and am now almost a quarter of the way through my plan!

It’s exciting to see progress in terms of the plan, and it’s pretty cool too when you look at overall progress over time. I’ve been at it for about a year now, and the history graphs show I’ve been consistent in some areas and sporatic in others.

Here’s my Time breakdown per month in the last year. I was definitely a bit overzealous when I started and there was definitely some slacking around the winter and the holidays.

But taking a look at the Distance breakdown it looks a bit more even.

My Pace breakdown is pretty even as well. Good to know that after the winter hiatus I didn’t regress much.

The most interesting one of all is the Heart Rate breakdown. The system captures how much time I actually spent in each heart rate zone during my workouts, and colors the bar graph in with the zone color I was in.

This graph is revealing because it shows I haven’t been working as hard as in the beginning. I spent a lot more time in red in the early months, and I’m barely in any red in the last two. I credit that to following the plan better, which doesn’t require me to work super hard to gain results. Work smarter not harder. :)

Another way to see workout trends is in the Workout Journal, which is linked both from the Track menu and also on the bottom left of the History graphs. It shows data for every workout I’ve done in a table format.

Selecting the column headings will sort all the data by that stat. Since I’m on the lose weight plan I wanted to see workouts where I’m burning the most calories.

The sorted view shows top calorie burning workouts are all from my current plan, so I’m heading in the right direction with this plan!

Experiencing adidas miCoach: Analyzing Workout Details

There are lots of ways to analyze my workout performance after I sync the data to the web. The most basic one is the automatic system feedback that tells me my performance against what miCoach had prescribed for me.

There’s also the quick visual on my heart rate chart that shows how much my heart rate stayed within the workout colors intended.

I can also open the color zone boxes at the right of my heart rate chart to see actual time and stats spent within the color. According to this workout, I spent more than 4 minutes of the 21 min workout in green.

I can also overlay another statistic on top of my current stat view. I found it fascinating to overlay the pace data on top of the heart rate. Most of the time an increase in my pace means an increase to my heart rate. Sometimes I have to stop at street corners or pause for other reasons, but my heart rate isn’t that reactive so it might only fluctuate slightly.

And finally, there’s a checkbox on the bottom right corner of the chart called “Analysis Bounds”. When I turn that on, I can drag the boundaries around on the chart to focus in on the area of the workout I really care about. This workout had 5 minutes of warm up and 10 minutes of cool down. What I really cared about was the middle few minutes where I was going back and forth between the green and yellow zones. I dragged the bounds in to the beginning and end of that area and the summary stats at the top adjusts to reflect only the data within my boundaries. I actually hit 100% within that half a mile block!

That got me thinking whether I did just as well with some of my other workouts. I can click on the workout name and open the workout navigator and quickly jump to a previously completed workout and do this all over again. :)

Experiencing adidas miCoach: Catching Up on Missed Workouts

I’ve fallen woefully behind on my workout schedule.

In part the weather has only been so so, but mostly because I’m in the process of moving so there’s been no free time. I got as far as the fourth workout, which was completed 10 days ago. I’m supposed to complete workout #10 today. But let’s be realistic, I know I won’t get back to #5 until at least end of next week.
I could individually drag and drop the workouts to fix my schedule, but that would take a while to do for the remaining 29 workouts.

Luckily there’s an option to restore my plan schedule.

I select Restore Schedule from the drop down and it allows me to choose the date I want to restart the plan and which workout to restart it with. I’ll be conservative and aim for next weekend to get back to my workout #5.

I clicked OK and voila! the schedule has been restored and my schedule updates to show the new scheduling of workouts.

Let’s hope there’s some good weather happening in the greater Boston area here by then so I can get back on my schedule!

Experiencing adidas miCoach: Mapping the Workout

On a beautiful Saturday morning a week ago I decided to run near the Charles River. I like running near the river because there’s a wonderful breeze that comes off the river  balancing against the heat of the sun. I went to Manage > Routes and mapped out the route I took, which came to a little over 2 miles over the course of about half an hour.

I went back to my Dashboard and clicked into the Plan Tracker on workout #3 to go to the details of that workout.

From there I selected the Route view and opened up my Routes List to locate the route I had just drawn and saved.

It immediately applies the route I selected to my workout, as can be seen with the name of the route selected displaying next to the Route view icon in the upper right hand corner, and also loads the saved route into my current view.

I zoomed in to a particular segment on my path, and when I hovered over a point I had drawn it showed me the cumulative distance at that point. There are also automatic mile markers in a purple outlined balloon along the path as well for reference.

I can also hide the tool bar at the top of the map to gain more visible space on the map.

I ended up covering another half a mile after I completed workout #3 before getting home. I captured that as a free workout separately because I wanted to get credit for the additional half mile (hey, every little bit counts!).

I could have arrived back at home more closely to the end of the workout by just listening to the miCoach Pacer narration. For plan workouts it will narrate the percent completion at 25%, 50% and 75%, so I could have turned around and doubled back at the half way point. But I like my scenery to change, so I try not to do a straight double back if I can. Now that I have a sense of how far it is to the river, and how long it takes me to run that distance, I can plan to do other workouts that are around the same length using a similar route. I have a pretty good sense of how much I can deviate from that path now and still make it home in about the amount of time it takes to do the workout. I look forward to the next beautiful day so I can do this all over again!

Experiencing adidas miCoach: Working Out and Sharing Results

So my first workout was supposed to be redoing the Assessment Workout on Saturday – but the weather was frigid for outdoor running in Boston so it didn’t happen. I figured I couldn’t have deteriorated that much and my previous results were probably fine.

I created a public view of my latest Assessment Workout using the Share functionality, so you can see the full workout screen shot with the coach’s feedback too.

Armed with my existing assessment, I proceeded with doing the first plan workout that was scheduled for Monday morning.

I was still on east coast time, so woke up early enough to do a run before starting the day. I put on my heart rate monitor, clipped the stride sensor onto my shoe, and headed down to the hotel treadmill with my iPod and Pacer. I forgot that I had previously left Pacer on Mandarin, so was pleasantly surprised by a female Mandarin speaking coach welcoming me to miCoach. I did a short 7 min free workout first because I found in the past that the heart rate signal is best after I start sweating. After finishing that workout I started up workout #1 of my lose weight plan.

It was a fun workout actually, and wasn’t too long either so I had time to sync the data to my account before jumping in the shower. I remembered that I wanted to hear my coaching in English next time so I changed that on the web first.

Then I plugged Pacer into my computer via the USB cable and synced via the miCoach Manager.

When that was done I went back to my Dashboard to see that it updated with my latest data.

That’s when I noticed I had a new achievement!

Turns out I had reached my first 10,000 calories since I started using miCoach! That’s pretty sweet. :-)

Clicking on the big 10000 took me to my workout results that gave me this achievement.

I overlaid my pace info on top of the heart rate info before using the Share functionality to create the public page of workout #1, which also shows my notes and ratings too.

First workout done, and 32 more to go! According to the plan tracker at the bottom of my dashboard I’ve completed 3% of my plan. Feels good!

Experiencing adidas miCoach: Setting Up

As a designer on a project we don’t always get the luxury of actually experiencing the products we have worked countless hours, sweat blood and tears to help create. I am lucky enough to have the opportunity to use the product (and no, not just in testing) after all the hustle and bustle around launching a new phase. I figured it would provide an interesting perspective to  share my experiences actually using the adidas miCoach training platform for all to see, so here goes!

I’ll be traveling on Sunday, so I’m figuring I should set my plan up before I go. It’s almost summer, so it’s time to shed some of the winter layers and go for that lose weight plan. It says it’s about 9 weeks long, ~35 workouts, so if I start now I’ll be done just in time for 4th of July.

I set up the new plan and the calendar shows me what my schedule looks like for this plan.

The first run is an assessment workout, which will determine what my heart rate zones should be during the training. Although I’ve done one before, I think the last few weeks of cold and rain in Boston plus perhaps some adding on of winter layers probably contributed to my lack of fitness, so I’m going to do a new and fresh one to see if I’m still up to snuff.

Here’s hoping the weather holds tomorrow when this all starts. Stay tuned!

Life with miCoach

So I'm going to start writing some posts on the company blog. It's my attempt to ever so subtly re-establish my existence on the web. I'll be re-posting my posts here for good old archival reasons. I've had my computer kill itself twice within 6 months, so I don't trust stuff to stick around without multiple backup copies.