Reducing friction for users migrating to 3DEXPERIENCE Solidworks
Solidworks
2023-2024
I designed a set of interactive Quick Tours which onboarded legacy Solidworks users to 3DExperience Solidworks workflows addressing many complaints from loyal Solidworks customers.
Solidworks is a beloved product by its long time legacy users. They are proud of their niche workflows, intensive knowledge of Solidworks, and often are the CAD Admins for their teams tasked with training CAD engineers below them to use Solidworks. They are critical advocates for Solidworks at their companies and thus powerful stakeholders to consider as Solidworks has developed as a product.
In 2020, a cloud- platform version of Solidworks launched, 3DExperience Solidworks. The launch of this product, advocacy for users to adopt this product, and poor onboarding for cloud features caused many companies to refuse to switch to 3DExperience Solidworks, or, switch the the Cloud CAD platform competitor OnShape.
ROLE
Product Design Lead
TEAM
UX (Me)
UXR Support (1)
Developers (1)
Customer Adoption (3)
DURATION
1 Month (Phase 1)
2 Months (Phase 2)
3DEXPERIENCE Solidworks was not meeting the needs of users
From issues with tedious updates to connectivity issues, lack of offline abilities and data management concerns, the launch of 3DEXPERIENCE Solidworks (also known as Solidworks Connected) did not excite users, and in fact, drove some loyal customers away. When I first started working at Solidworks the state of the the product was dire. We needed a way to start showing users the value in adopting the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
Pivoting the Target Audience: Designing for Small Companies
Many Solidworks customers are large companies with 1000+ seats of Solidworks needed. Industries include defense, aircrafts, heavy machinery, etc. The barrier to migrate customers such as these to a cloud-based platform was incredibly high especially since many worked with highly confidential files. Predictably, none of these customers were willing to switch to 3DEXPERIENCE since the existing Solidworks PDM (Product Data Management) worked perfectly for their needs.
A new use case & target user group revealed itself around this time. There were alot of smaller companies using our product and paying incredibly high prices for an enterprise version of Solidworks when they only needed 1-3 seats for their minimal engineering team.
Around this time is when I joined Solidworks as a User Experience Designer and took on the challenge of onboarding companies such as these to 3DEXPERIENCE Solidworks.
THE CHALLENGE
How might we onboard legacy users to a powerful but complex cloud-connected version of Solidworks in a way that will provide value to their existing workflows ?
User Research - Mapping Workflows & Friction Points
We identified a few 1-3 seat companies who were using 3DEXPERIENCE Solidworks for their engineering and file management needs. I set up a 1 hour interview with these companies and used a semi-structured interview format to understand their workflows, frustrations, and immediate needs when it came to working with cloud-connected features of Solidworks. The frustrations rang loud - endless grievances about platform connectivity, update behavior, confusion about terminology, and data management woes. I learned a lot about keeping with the structure of the research interview while balancing emotional empathy for the users I talked to.
Topics covered in the interviews:
Phase 1 Research Outcomes
Issues with the Save to 3DEXPERIENCE & Open from 3DEXPERIENCE dialog proved to be the largest barrier towards any hope of platform adoption. We needed an immediate solution to the critical terminology gap between in this new version of Solidworks. After meeting with the Customer Adoption team and mapping out best practices for small companies, I overlayed the feedback on the Save & Open dialogs based on what also contributed to best practice workflows. Red notes were critical to understanding 3DEXPERIENCE Solidworks and Orange notes were informational but would likely not cause data disruption.
Phase 1 Design Outcome: In-Context Quick Tips
An immediate solution came to mind to integrate some in-context quick tips into these dialogs. The most important trait for these quick tips is for them to not be repeptitive and not interfere with legacy users. A quick series of informational tips were designed and developed to only appear on first open of the Save to 3DEXPERIENCE dialog and the Open from 3DEXPERIENCE dialog. The user could easily close the quick tips by clicking anywhere. The tips would help clarify the terms users were not familiar with, or at least, point them in the right direction if they were to research best practices in their own time.
Selecting a Bookmark when saving was particularly crucial for users to understand since the Customer Adoption team of Solidworks reported many users that had no structure to their data saved on the platform.
Research Outcomes - Part 2
The rest of the interview research was synthesized, thanks to the UX Research Team, into 3 areas where users felt like they wanted more guidance.
Configurations
Confusion over the 3DEXPERIENCE terms "CAD Family" and "Representation"
"When do we use a CAD Family and when do we use a Representation?"
"We were told not to enable 3DEXPERIENCE Configurations because it would mess up our existing configurations"
Product & Lifecycle Management
Confusion over terms "Maturity", "Lock/ Unlock", "Status".
1 Company uses 3DEXPERIENCE apps for all PLM (Collaborative Tasks, Markups, Revision Manager), but accessing apps feels disconnected.
Revisioning & branch revisioning is unclear.
Migrating Data
"We stick to the windows file explorer because migrating our files would be a nightmare".
Users are instructed to go file by file when moving data to the platform.
"Pieces of data exist on both local drives and cloud"
Design Approach
Quick Tours Access Point
I needed a hub for all of these Quick Tours to live. Most Solidworks learnings open in a separate browser window navigating the user away from Solidworks. The Quick Tours needed to be somewhere that wouldn't be distracting, but could still accessed easily by the users that needed guidance. The Welcome Dialog is a window that pops-up on open allowing users to navigate to specific tasks and files they need immediately upon entering the software. This dialog already holds a "Learn Tab" , although most of these resources need separate browser windows to access.
Playing around with the already existing elements in a low-fidelity form allowed me to see what layout the Quick Tours would be best accessed at.
Design Outcome [In Progress]
Description + Final Outcome w/ specific choices & impact
Future Outcomes [In Progress]
Successes and Projects
A Success Story : Bow Head successfully onboarded their team to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. 800 engineering parts made it to the platform and their CAD team helps us shape the best practices for onboarding small companies to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
"Updates" Project - To address the many complaints about constant updates I took on a project drastically reduce the number of update pop ups (to only once an update is mandatory) & to start update in-app reducing the click path of updating from 12 steps to 3.
Tool Integration projects: After this project, my focus transitioned into adding value to the platform through 3DEXPERIENCE tool integration. I became particularly interested in understanding collaboration workflows during the design process & developing workflows that meet these needs.
