User Performance

Recent releases of Revit have focused on performance and this effort will continue into the future.  These efforts come in two forms: Machine Performance and User Performance.

Machine Performance specifically refers to the time it takes the system to respond to a user action. Examples are faster graphics, improved start-up times, and quicker file open.  Many strategies are employed by factory workers such as code optimization, memory optimization, and multi-threading.  These are very cool meetings where half the words spoken are computer jargon. Greps, Atoms, ect..   We test code changes with large customer data sets and produce amazing charts and graphs.  There is now even a dedicated performance farm.  I'll share more in future posts for the curious.

User Performance measures the time it takes you to understand and respond to a machine signal.  Work has been done here as well.  The ability to create more shortcuts to commands or work mode-less with properties are examples.  Sometimes it's very subtle such as limiting the amount of data presented at a single time or making it easier to scan a list.  Human Factors guidelines, patterns, and flow charts rule here.

In this post I am soliciting examples of what internally we call "Point of Use". Way back in release seven or eight we enabled it so you could jump from one place in the UI to another from property fields.  The best example is material.  From any element material field if you want to view details of this material or define a new one on the fly you can jump to the material dialog and later return.

At the time Revit was full of dead ends.  You would be in a place, decide you need something new defined, back-out, create the new item, and return to the previous location.  drill down, back out, drill down, back out..repeat.  No good for user performance.

Progress was made then yet some of these remain.  Once example is you can't load a new profile from the internal wall sweep dialog - you must exit, load the profile, and return to the dialog.

I have a list going of these but wanted to solicit examples from you mostly because I am interested in which ones are the most painful/memorable/frequently encountered.  Each of these require a specific fix by different code owners so it's not easy to make a global change.  Instead its a continual effort to knock them off.  A similar approach was used for dialog re-sizing. 2011 got many but a few (hopefully lower frequency dialogs) remain.  We'll get them to in time.

Where do you recall you need to back out of a dialog more often?

_erik

Comments

[Rafael Alvarez]

I would say the loading of profiles is a big one, as well as being able to delete a material in the material dialog box that comes from inside the wall structure dialog box.

Also I would look into being able to create a profile from the dialog box, which would probably necessitate the creating of another Revit instance or thread, and then load into the project. Anything that can reduce the number of steps required to customize objects is welcome as this is one of the biggest complaints we get from new users, especially designers.

Maybe a system where you can graphically go into a sketch mode of a mullion or post (in a railing, etc.) and start from a rectangular profile that can be edited to something else. Kind of like how you can edit the elevation profile of a wall now.

[Chris Hubbard]

Stairs,
we need to be able to load profiles for rails and baluster families from the stair dialogs and have an apply from the each to see what has changed.

Also can we combine the rails and balusters into a single dialog with some sort of preview?

[Dave Baldacchino]

The ones that come to mind are fill and line patterns when assigning an object override. If they don't exist, you have to exit, create, and start all over again

[Michael Coviello]

I agree with stairs and having previews too.
DWF/DWFx-Preview
Ability to load new links from "manage links".
SaveAs new family template (rte)

[Yves Gravelin]

For me, the worst is managing fonts in texts, dimensions, annotations.
Each font must be changed each time.
Imagine : I want to change all the fonts in the standard template provided with Revit to conform to my corporate standards .
I have to do it 92 times!
in 20 dimentions types
8 text types
23 text types in annotations
37 label types in annotations
1 stair type
3 ramp types

[Marc Toppel]

I agree with being able to delete materials when who dive in through thee wall editor. It's so easy to pile up the material types, but you never remember to edit them alone.

Overall, deleting and types of anything from anywhere would go a long way to make things more fluid.

[Josh Moore]

For me a big one is the inability to duplicate a wall type or something else when in group edit mode. We do a lot of projects that are multi-family, and we create the units using model groups. Sometimes it's very annoying having to back out of group edit mode to duplicate a wall or door or something.

[Anthony Hauck]

Good one.

[Russell Higgins]

I wish that the offset input box was large enough (or could be re-sized) so that fractions showed--sometimes you look and think it's 0'-0" but it's really 0'-0 1/2" since only the zeros fit in the display and you proceed with the operation only to have to undo it

[Anthony Hauck]

A very simple fix. Anything that can be changed without huge effort yet make life simpler in day to day work is worth looking into. Thanks

[Tim Waldock]

For starters:
1. In any dialog box that has a drop-down menu (eg. VG workset visibility), you need 2 or 3 clicks to choose something - 1 to get focus in field, 2 to activate drop-down (sometimes a separate click), 3 to choose off list. It should be one fluid mouse-click, drag down the list and let go. that would help avoiding RSI too.

2. In any dialog box that has a drop-down menu - please show more than 6 in the list! We don't have 640x480 VGA monitors any more; it should show as many as possible.

3. In any dialog box that has a drop-down menu, when you click on the list it should have the pre-selected item in the middle of the list so you can quickly go up or down without scroll bar. Usually the selected one is at the top of the list, so you have to hit the scroll bar to see the item directly above (very annoying).

4. Drop-down lists should always have a scroll bar. Orient to other view does not.

5. In the "two-step process" of changing properties of any family that refers to another family (eg profiles, annotation etc), it would be great to have a button to the right of the selected family/type that takes you to the properties of that type (to alter, duplicate etc); then you need a button to return.

6. In the "three-step process" of changing properties of an annotation family that refers to settings too (section, elev, callout tags), we need a pop-up message that tells you to go to "Manage Settings" to set up the tags. A shortcut might be a bit dangerous for inexperienced users to get in there too easily. From the section/elev/callout settings type properties we need a shortcut button to type properties of the families used therein.

[Anthony Hauck]

All great suggestions.  Thank you

[Dave Baldacchino]

Re: Josh Moore comment regarding duplicating in Group Edit mode, note that Revit lets you duplicate a wall or other family in the Family tree of the project browser. So it can do it, just not in the Edit Type dialog (weird!)

[PaulB]

Not quite on track but here goes anyway. Once I have started a schedule and placed it on a sheet I would like to edit the schedule on the sheet purely for the fact that I can zoom in to areas of the schedule to be able to read it easier but I have to back out and edit from the schedule view.

[Tim Waldock]

Here's another one:
To change the workset of an existing object, I have to select it, go to the properties dialog and scroll down to the workset field. Generally I'll find it is greyed out as I don't yet own the object. In previous versions I had to close the properties dialog, and take ownership (Make element editable), then reopen properties and scroll down again to change the workset. Now, in v2011, I thought it might be easier - maybe it would be possible to take ownership by changing another property of the object, moving the mouse away (to apply) and back. But no, you still have to deselect the object and then reselect it before the workset field on the properties dialog is enabled. AND then you may need to scroll down to the field and click on the drop-down menu then scroll again to find the correct workset . . . .

It can be really tedious for what should be a one-click operation.