Autodesk2017

Asset Library for AutoCAD

Design A feature in AutoCAD that leverages machine learning to help users find existing content more effectively.

Background

What’s AutoCAD?

AutoCAD is the most ubiquitous Computer-Aided design(CAD) software. It is basically a drawing tool that helps people create 2D and 3D graphics.

Project Scope

Internship project at Autodesk

My work: Design and prototype the solutions, test them with AutoCAD customers.

Team member

Problem

How can we reuse content in AutoCAD more effectively?

When users reuse content from previous files, they always have a hard time finding the content they need.

Target Users

Who has the problem of content reuse?

We combined survey results and AutoCAD customer data to understand who the largest addressable market is and to identify a person to conduct our design and testing around.

Design Goal & Ideation

How can we help users reuse previous content more effectively?

After clearly defining our target users, our design goal is to aid AutoCAD users – like Stewart – to reuse they know they’ve made before but cannot find.

1. Understand the problem

We have two types of users, the CAD manager, and drafters. CAD managers are people who create standard contents and maintain those contents. And drafters who use those contents, and edit contents from the shared library.

400+ repondents

In order to understand the pervasiveness of each problem and gather some more information about the facets of each problem, we sent out the survey to AutoCAD customers and get more than 400+ respondents.

We prioritized the problems we wanted to solve and narrow down our focus on pulling content from shared library.

2. Sketch ideas

Tuesday is about solutions to those HMW problems. This is where we came up with the ideas that will become building blocks of the prototype that we’re going to test later. LUMA Idea harvest, Mockuptionary, sketch are the methods we use to come up with ideas.

3. Make decision

on Wednesday, we used structured processes to move through, make quick good decisions, with lots of input. After reviewing the ideas in a structured evaluation process, we made the call and decide to move forward with a mix of ideas of allowing users to migrate users’ existing content to the library, automatically classify content, and search content by text.

Migrate

Reorganize users library

Classification

Automatically label items when adding content

Search

Enable users to search for content

4. Prototype

On Thursday, we build a prototype that simulate the real experience of Autocad users regarding searching. Here, users are working on a layout drawing, and he wants to find a desk to put in his drawing.

5. User Testing

On the last day of our design sprint, we went out of the office to visit our customers on-site. We interviewed 6 users at 3 companies, tested them with the prototype we built for their feedback.

All 3 have maintained libraries.
Different field has different naming specification regarding search by text.
The content users want displayed with their search results varies greatly

Tested a prototype with 6 subjects at 3 companies(Architecture, Civil Engineering, AV systems )

All 3 have maintained libraries.
Different field has different naming specification regarding search by text.
The content users want displayed with their search results varies greatly

Product Development Cycle

How can we further develop our idea?

In order to leverage the user feedback we got to further develop our idea, we planned 3 cycles of Scrum cycle and refined our prototype by more user testing and interview.

Final Results

The final demo allows users to easily migrate their existing content to the library, and categorize them through machine learning algorithm and search content by text easily.

Integrated final Demo

*Due to confidentiality reasons, only thumbnails of those prototypes can be presented.