The lack of posts in the past week does not mean its been all Dos Equis and Guitar Hero here at the Factory (although that would be nice!) On the contrary, we have been very busy - not only re-examining the new user interface, but the larger User Experience (UX) team has been in "research mode" for the past few months. Since starting this blog in March, we have been focusing mostly on the present (the current Revit release) and the past (R&D that lead up to the release.) The comments to date have been extremely helpful and insightful (not to mention humbling in many cases.) However, we never intended this to be the "ribbon blog," so we now want to spend some looking forward and examine some other ongoing research projects here at the Factory. We hope this will give you an idea of not only potential future areas of Revit development, but also the methods with which we conduct research.
A note about methods. Based on some of the comments in the past months, I am afraid people may have the wrong idea of how we conduct user research here. Although useful, sifting through usage logs only gets us so far. Much of what we do is pounding the pavement and getting out, talking and observing users and putting "meat" on the bones of our quantitative findings. This can take the form of observing users in their workplace, phone interviews, screen-sharing teleconference sessions, surveys, focus group discussions, group brainstorming and usability studies of existing products, among many others. We are also constantly working to improve what we do, tweaking, mashing up methods and abandoning those that do not work. More to come...
_tom
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