Making Project Vasari

 

Yesterday was the day. We officially launched Project Vasari on Autodesk Labs. I thought I would give everyone a behind the scenes look at how this all came about.

Genesis

As we said in the teaser, it started as a simple question: What if we reduced Revit to its essentials? Followed quickly by: What would it look like? What would we keep? Who would it be for? This evolved into the following goals:

• Create a simplified "on-ramp" to introduce building information modeling concepts to students and young designers
• Focus on the conceptual modeling and cloud-based analysis work flows
• Create a "sandbox" where we can experiment on new features and concepts
• Deliver this as a technology preview on the web

Design Tenets

The following design tenets were our guiding principles as we began conceiving of what to make

• Let users get their hands dirty faster
• Reduce modality
• Focus on teachable moments
• Progressively disclose complexity
• Build a community

Personas and Storyboards

A persona is a one-page narrative that describes a fictional user based on user data we have gathered. After interviewing and surveying many students, we distilled that data into Gabriel .This helps us keep the team user-centered. As we face various decisions, we must ask "what would Gabriel   think of this?"  We also wrote a series of scenarios - stories with Gabriel as the main character. These act as the basis for some early sketching and storyboards (note, not all of these ideas made the final cut.) 

Being Agile

In addition to the previously mentioned goals - we also wanted to see what a small team could do in a short amount of time. By "small", I mean one product manager, five software developers, two designers and one quality assurance analyst/blogger/mad scientist. By "short time" I mean six months from inception to delivery. To do this we adopted a more agile team process called Scrum. I won't go into much detail, but to put it simply Scrum is like IPD for software development: A cross disciplinary team co-locates to increase collaboration, breaks down roles to foster innovation (QA helps with design, designers do some coding, etc.) focuses work on a central information repository (in our case, the source code and a wiki) and shares equally in the risk and reward.

So, isn't this just Revit with a bunch of stuff removed?

Yes and no. Yes, it is Revit at its core. But no, we did make some progress in some areas - primarily related to our design tenets. Ultimately, Vasari has become a platform to experiment and take some risks - something that has become difficult when trying to get the larger Revit out the door each year. So what's different?

• A smaller, less imposing user interface.
• Access to massing tools is more streamlined. Were you asked to switch visibility mode when creating a mass? Were you asked to name your mass when you created it? Did you actually have to create the mass at first?
• You can double click to edit an in-place mass and double click to stop editing it. My personal favorite.
• When you are editing an in-place mass the background changes color and non-edited masses become transparent.  Notice I said reduced modality, not removed. We follow Jef Raskin's definition of modality, that is, an interface is not modal as long as the user is fully aware of its current state.
• Levels and reference planes are now visible in 3D in the project environment. This allowed us to keep the experience primarily in 3D, with little need for 2D views.
• The product is delivered in a nice, compact, single executable. No licensing. No big installer wizard.
• Realistic views have edges turned on by default.
• And our dirty secret? Much of the look and feel was achieved using a plain ol' Revit template.

What's Next?

I can't say. I know, I know - tight lipped as usual. Actually, it is because I really don't know. I do know that we have generated a lot of ideas (stories in our backlog, to use Scrum terminology.) Now that we have some time to breathe we will listen to the feedback that comes back from our target demographic, sift through the backlog and decide on what to tackle next.  Until then, come join us on Facebook and Twitter where we will continue the conversation. 

_tom

A video introducing Project Vasari's features:

 

Comments

[Dave Light]

Tom,

Great insight! You need to include some metric templates. :-)

[Gabriel Cottam]

You ask: "what would Gabriel think of this?"

My name is Gabriel. I'm a BIM manager for a consulting MEP engineering firm.

And I think this is a colossal waste of precious development resources that could have (SHOULD have) been used to make the product you've already got work the way you promised it would.

There are so many "bugs" that still need fixing. But never mind your existing customers - they've already paid. Gotta hook new ones.

[Erik Hedvall]

I have got to agree with Gabriel. It's nice that you're playing around with new ideas, but there's some serious work that needs doing with the existing program. Please get to it instead of attempting to add pretty but not useful solar analysis tools and more buzzwords.

Make stairs work, make good 3d-modelling tools, make interior renders reliable... there's a long long list. Please adress some of these issues hampering productivity on a daily basis.

[Tom Vollaro]

@gabriel and @erik, As with any company (including yours, I suspect), different people work on different projects for different business reasons. On this blog we strive to give everyone a well-rounded look at what goes on here. This is just one of many projects that we are going on inside the factory. Rest assured, many more of my smart and dedicated colleagues are working in earnest on all aspects of the Revit platform. This is just one r&d effort that I have been working on and thought it was interesting to highlight.

[Rafael Alvarez]

I for one applaud this effort. It is a good idea to try to appeal to the architectural student and designers in general. That crowd has proven to be one of the toughest to convince to use BIM tools.

As a "sandbox" to try new ideas Project Vasari may prove very useful. It gets new features in front of users more quickly, without affecting Revit's release cycle, and without having to be limited by the very broken Beta program. Project Vasari will get more broad feedback, which can only make Revit better.

Right now it seems feedback and feature development is only affected by marketing and a select group of firms whose workflow and architectural process is very specific. This is causing really important features that most of us need not to be focused on, because the big clients might not need them. These big firms can afford many software solutions, programming specialists and support departments to make up for gaps in the software's functionality. The majority of us cannot, and I appeal to Revit's developers to look beyond the star architects.

[Craig Davis]

What's next? The answer giving by Tom Valloro or Autodesk that they don't really know what's next, concerns me very very much. It implies that they really don't have any clue of the architecture industry. The sad part is that the other autodesk departments do know. Just look at how Autocad has risen from the dead when they saw the current industry trends.

The Project Vasari could be a great product if the proper conceptual tools where implemented. Or at least, if the intention is to implement better tools in the next release. But to sit back and wait for feedback is a death sentence for this product.

That said, I think the factory should really investigate what conceptual packages people are using currently in practice or at schools, especially the specific tools they are using in these packages. It would then be obvious that Revit and Vasari doesn't offer non of those tools. So by providing a free package to get people on board would only attract a few people who are living under a rock. People have grown accustom with tools that allow you to add vertices and edges to faces regardless of the directions it was extruded. People have been using tools like end-caps, bevel, 3d fillet, soft selection, 2 rail sweep, etc for years now. And to mention the obvious modifiers like, twist, smooth, 4x4 cage etc.

So, please take a look at those tools and figure out why people are using them. If you can come up with a tools that can provide the same results or better, then you will have a great product. You guys invented the create form tool which is already quite revolutionary. Just make the effort to make it worth using Vasari instead of rhino. And now you have the chance with Vasari without having to compromise in a full fledged packaged as Revit.