Packed house: Several thousand engineers attend Solidworks World each year
There’s always an upbeat mood at the Solidworks World convention, which attracts several thousand designers and engineers from around the globe to a venue in the US each year.
The delegates at the event, this year held in Phoenix, Arizona, aren’t shy of declaring their love for the 3D design giant’s products. When the conference doors open, people actually sprint to get the best seats. Branded T-shirts and bags are worn without any embarrassment by a large percentage of the audience. Colour-coded badges indicating level of software adeptness are worn with pride. It’s one big user love-in.
Audience participation reaches a crescendo towards the end of the three-day event, with a session outlining the top 10 enhancements to the latest version of Solidworks software. Delegates – mainly men – whoop, holler and fist-pump as new functions scroll across massive screens. Spontaneous applause rolls around the hall.
It’s rare to see such blatant product loyalty in the engineering sector. And Solidworks knows that. The company recognises that it has an enormous amount of goodwill, and is intent on tapping into the devotion as a means of further improving the usability of its product.
This has manifested itself in a new project, where Solidworks has tracked how a large group of its customers go about using its CAD software on a day-to-day basis. “It’s our big data project,” says Rick Chin, the company’s director of product innovation. “When somebody installs our software they have the opportunity to opt in to allow us to track their user performance data. We get to see what buttons they push when using the product, what features they are executing, and how long they are logged in for – things like that.
“There’s a privacy policy, so we can’t identify them individually, and we can’t collect any information that gives us any insight into their intellectual property or designs. It’s strictly how are they going through the product.”
Solidworks has been collecting this data for several years. But this is the first time that it has taken a comprehensive look at the data being provided. The company has specific intermediate goals: first, it is keen to analyse behaviour patterns to enable it to develop user ‘segmentation’ based on how its customers operate the product, such as what commands they use, what commands they use together in tandem, and how frequently they access certain functions. By putting these users in segments, new products might be more intuitive, being able to better predict how a user will go about navigating the software, enabling the more accurate provision of prompts and guidance.
Well over a terabyte of information has been collected, and a data mining company has been hired to carry out what’s known as a cluster analysis so that eventually certain identifiable groups of user types emerge.
Chin says: “When you talk about user segmentation traditionally, you talk demographics – location, industry, company size, things like that. But here we will be separating the users specifically on how they use the product. That’s going to give us the ability to see what capabilities each segment is using, the sequence of events that generally happen, and then we can start coming up with new product features, even new products, to serve a particular segment.
“We use these insights to see if natural groupings of people start to emerge based on their similar use of the product. These natural groupings become the user segmentations that we are after. This means we can identify specific group types in our population, and we have a pretty precise understanding of how they use our product.
“By identifying these segments and understanding how they use the product, we can then design new functionality for these types of users that we know will complement their current methods well. And this is only one of many ways we can create new value for our users by understanding them in this new way.”
Good listener: Rick Chin, right, on stage at Solidworks World
Another intermediate goal is to enable Solidworks to create association graphs, as used by internet giants such as Amazon. When a customer buys an Amazon product, the software works out how likely they are to buy another item, and it makes a recommendation. Chin says that Solidworks has already collected an incredible network of association data that will enable it to work out how likely it is that someone might want to use a related product, and then make recommendations.
“If you use the extrude feature or the fillet feature a lot, well maybe you might use the draft feature too,” he says. “People like you typically use that feature. So we recommend that to you.
“Solidworks has been around for a long time – it’s used in every imaginable product. Customers who adopt the product tend to use functions that serve their needs. Often they don’t venture beyond that. But there might be this wonderful capability that’s going to save them time, or frustration, and they’re unaware of it. So we are going to try to reveal it to them.”
Every release of the Solidworks product has around 200 new features. Often it’s up to the user to go through these performance upgrades to find what they need. But Chin says perhaps in the future Solidworks would be able to provide a more customised ‘what’s new’ tick-sheet, based on individual user patterns. “There’s all these new and different things we might be able to do with the data,” he says.
The first stage of the data mining project was meant to have been completed – but Solidworks ran into a hiccup just before completion, which required it to cut out some data and reanalyse the findings. It realised that a good chuck of the data came from pirated seats of Solidworks. And there were concerns about whether those pirated seats would provide ‘typical’ characteristics of an average user.
Chin admits that he was extremely surprised to see that such illegal users would decide to voluntarily opt in to a tracking project, but they were struck out, and the remaining information was reinterpreted.
“We wanted legitimate users,” says Chin. “And because of that the findings aren’t yet available. But the first set of results will be with us soon.”
In the meantime, one of the things that revealed itself in the invalid data, says Chin, was the role of a user labelled as a ‘manager’ – somebody who only went into the software for a couple of hours a week and then only used query-oriented tools such as view manipulation and measurement functions. “We could see that they were going in and ‘checking stuff’,” says Chin. And that activity trend, should it appear again in the untainted data, could help Solidworks to develop ways of coercing such users into making the most of other, relevant software functionality.
When the data crunching is completed, Solidworks says it will look to back up any findings with qualitative data through customer site visits and surveys, to provide richer information that might feed into new product developments. The data might also be fed into the My Solidworks online community in the form of training videos and user tips. “My hope is that we will be able to do exactly that and to provide value to customers,” says Chin.
Two of the more recent product launches from Solidworks – its Industrial and Conceptual Design packages – have been made available on parent company’s Dassault Systèmes 3DExperience platform, which has social collaboration through the cloud at its heart. This illustrates a trend towards ‘software as a service,’ rather than more traditional ‘bought’ seat packages that are installed on individual machines, which lends itself well to big data and user analytics, and ultimately to the promise of more customised products.
In the future, for instance, Solidworks products could be presented as an app, and be sector specific to, say, the defence industry, should that be what the user wants. In that case, they could be configured perfectly for typical use in that sector. Chin admits that this is an enticing possibility. “Wouldn’t it be fantastic if you could do that, by industry, or by user type?” he says.
And in the near future Solidworks might also look to create an improved infrastructure that would allow it to ask questions of its users at any time, to supplement opt-in tracking and qualitative techniques. Chin says that the Solidworks community is more active than other software user groups, because the company goes back a long way and has always made active efforts to install seats within schools and universities, which encourages loyalty from a young age. So that might lead to more sophisticated data collection techniques.
“There’s a great deal of trust between us and the Solidworks users, so they are generally more open. People are willing to share data,” he says.
Top five new features for Solidworks 2015
1 New product development workflows
• Model Based Definition enables drawing-less product detailing with 3D PMI annotations; output to eDrawings or
3D PDF.
• Treehouse provides visual assembly structure planning, creation, editing, and viewing.
• Prepare models automatically for export to popular AEC applications.
Benefits: Reduce time to market and comply with new industry standards.
2 Integrated capabilities connect design and manufacturing
• Inspection automates inspection drawings and reports.
• Costing supports sensors and costing of weldments, plastic/cast parts, machined castings, and 3D printed parts.
• Print directly to 3D printers in AMF and 3MF formats.
• Use advanced techniques to flatten surfaces.
Benefits: Speed up downstream manufacturing and bridge the gap between design and manufacturing.
3 Solidworks performance
• File size reduced by 50%.
• Faster component patterning, and hide/show of assemblies.
• Simulation supports Intel Solver and multi-core for contact detection.
• Define specific graphic regions to render in PhotoView 360.
• Enterprise PDM manages large data sets more efficiently.
Benefits: Faster modelling, analysis, and rendering capabilities leave more time to improve designs.
4 Part and surface modelling
• Sketch: Line from mid-point; rectangle with horizontal/vertical construction lines.
• Splines: Improved spline on surface; convert style spline to spline points.
• Patterns: Improved fill, linear, and variable pattern.
• Advanced geometry: Asymmetric fillets; split surfaces; sketch plane normal to view.
Benefits: Create sketches, complex patterns, and advanced geometry faster and with less effort.
5 Assemblies
• Mates: Centre components on faces; select geometry to limit width mate.
• Routing for rectangular sections, such as HVAC ducts, cable trays and chutes.
• Simulate roller/energy chains using patterns along open or closed loops.
• Exploded View: Radially and along axis; space components on drag.
Benefits: Faster assembly of components.
Cloud encourages the sharing of ideas
The major product announcement at Solidworks World was the launch of Industrial Design, the second application on parent company Dassault Systèmes’ 3DExperience platform, which has been developed to encourage collaboration and sharing of ideas through the cloud.
The new package, complementary to Solidworks 3D CAD, allows engineers to generate multiple industrial design concepts in response to a brief, with tools for the creation, manipulation and modification of designs using native and imported geometry.
The software is designed to capture ideas digitally, allowing users to quickly create 3D concept models, get feedback from colleagues, and manage multiple concepts before committing to time to build a prototype.
Solidworks believes that constraints of traditional industrial design software can slow down the product design process and reduce cost efficiency and time-to-market. These problems include data incompatibility, extensive rework of designs and a disconnect between industrial and mechanical design teams, along with lack of collaboration during the design process and difficulty in evaluating multiple concepts.
Industrial Design aims to eliminate these barriers by offering a single modelling environment that improves the overall industrial design process. It provides social design capabilities and transparent data management that allow engineers and designers to solve industrial design challenges and easily transition to mechanical design.
Engineers can create complex shapes in 3D and add mechanical data directly to a model without changing product design software or environment. Concept sketching, integrated freeform and parametric surface/solid modelling, direct editing, realistic rendering and simplified design evolution tools are all features of this streamlined process.
Solidworks is betting big on Industrial Design. Like Conceptual Design, the first application introduced on 3DExperience, it has collaboration through the cloud as the central tenet of its appeal. Solidworks believes that engineers will be able to quicken development times and lower costs. And they will do so by being social.