Welcome to Inside the Factory – a blog about designing the Revit user experience. I’m Tom Vollaro, Senior User Researcher with AEC Solutions User Experience Team at Autodesk. Myself and other members of the team will be using this blog as a way to connect with you, Revit users. This blog has two goals. First, we want to provide a window into how the Revit user experience is designed (a bit more on that later). Second, we want to establish a conversation with our users to improve the Revit user experience.
So what is the Factory? The origins of the term stretch back in time before Revit was acquired by Autodesk. Ask this question in the AUGI forums and you will surely get many different theories about the etymology of the term. In short, the Factory is us. It is the interaction designers, product designers, user researchers, software engineers, quality assurance analysts, technical writers, product managers, marketing staff and everyone that participates in creating Revit and getting it into your hands.
As for the blog header image you see above, this literally is an image from "inside the factory." This is an image of the lobby of our brand new Autodesk AEC Headquarters here in Waltham, Massachusetts. The model was created using Revit Architecture 2009 by our architects KlingStubbins and builder Tocci. The image was rendered by yours truly using the beta version of Revit Architecture 2010. So once again, welcome to the Factory!
Wow, this is great, but where even to begin. Go ahead and focus on new features in 2010 for now, but then what; there are so many places to investigate and I would point out that many may be quite frustrated to have exhausted many subjects before and see no evidence of any activity on those issues. So a list of topics and a voting mechanism could be useful. But we also want to focus first on what the factory is most likely to pursue in the near future, so the results of a survey should be weighted by the factory without, as necessary, giving too much away, or the survey should only include topics of nearer term interest to Autodesk. Anyway, looking forward to discussions on keynote, schedules, text tools, site tools, parameters, family templates, UI, linking, wall joins, database implementation of text configuration files, elevation depth of field, yadayadayada, ..... cheers
Posted by: John Anderson | March 13, 2009 at 08:36 PM