Warning: I am quite passionate about SolidWorks - https://forum.solidworks.com/message/712813#comment-712966
When I feel very strongly about something, I can be somewhat verbose -
https://forum.solidworks.com/message/1010817?messageTarget=all&start=0&mode=comments#comment-1009693
Now that there is less than a week left with our beloved forum, I wanted to jot down a few notes.
Here we go . . .
Over 25 years ago I was an avid Pro/E user. A few years later I started working for a company that did not have a 3D modeling program, so I immediately started pushing for Pro/E. They ended up buying SolidWorks. I was a little disappointed at first, but I wanted to give it a fair shot. I had no idea how much that program would change my life. I wasted no time in becoming extremely involved in the SolidWorks Community. One of the “perks” of this involvement was being pulled into a conference room at SolidWorks World 2016 with about a dozen colleagues and @GB. We were invited to dive into something that they had been working on for a number of years, and take a “SWYM.” Shortly after the conference ended, I received the email with log-in credentials, and jumped in to check it out. The interface was somewhat confusing, and I didn’t really “see” anyone there. (If I remember correctly, I only “saw” a few of the aforementioned colleagues.)
I logged in a few more times, but there really wasn’t anything keeping my attention, so I didn’t go back.
Fast forward a few more years - the User Group Leaders section of the forum was being shut down, and everything User Group related was being moved to the platform. I spent a couple weeks dealing with various issues just trying to set up my account and get a log-in. When I was able to log-in, I was met with one of the least friendly user interfaces that I have ever encountered.
To give an example:
This is my familiar “interface” for getting from Point A to Point B -
Now I was being thrown into this, and being told "it's easy!" -
The new terminology just added to the confusion – Tenants/Communities/Dashboards/Widgets/and so on. Seeing various DS employees trip and stumble through the interface when they were attempting to show “how easy it is” didn’t do anything to boost my confidence. Being inundated with annoying tutorials & guided pop ups was only mildly helpful.
The interface is poorly laid out, bloated, crowded, and most of all, it is not intuitive.
If I had an excess amount of free time, I’d draw up a comparable SolidWorks interface to help illustrate – Let’s just say that the feature manager would take up about a third of the screen, the task pane would take up about a fourth of the screen, the buttons would be huge and the icons would have no correlation to their actual function. This would only leave a tiny amount of space for actual modeling. That about sums it up.
Has anyone read manuals or watched tutorials on how to use their smart phones? Most people just turn them on and get started . . . thanks to a somewhat intuitive interface.
Now for the fun part . . . I really, really want the platform to work.
I want this so badly that I have tried to rationalize some of the things that I have seen as “shortcomings.” I fully believe that the platform is incredibly powerful and capable of great things. However, much like multitasking, sometimes trying to do too many different things, translates to not doing any of those things particularly well.
You know, something like this:
We all know that the forum portion of the platform was an afterthought, and it was basically a “quick, we need to add this!”
I was going to rant about the platform not being indexed by Google, but that has already been fixed!
(HUGE Thanks to @GB for this post - https://blogs.solidworks.com/solidworksblog/2021/03/the-future-of-the-solidworks-communities.html
Now it is time to work with them to improve the interface.
I don’t know about you, but if I go to the forum to find an answer for a SolidWorks question, I will do one of the following: Start with a Google search, and click on the forum link that pops up; or, jump into the forum and hit the search bar.
I will also use John's spreadsheet -Forum SEARCH RETURNS - Over 189,000 Search Returns - 120 Categories - Excel (6/10/2020) Updated "API - Appearances & Bug" Searches - it is AWESOME!
Allowing Google indexing addresses the first option, and getting a better understanding of the 6W Tags will take care of the second option. (These look to be very powerful, and I just need to spend more time with them.)
Which brings me to a request (which I will formally submit on the platform) – Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to “save” certain search criteria like you can with PDM? Possibly have some of the 6W Tags “pre-filled” so that you can just add one or two items for a somewhat quick search.
For example: Say I want to see if Alin has posted another SolidWorks Power User Challenge. In the existing forum, I can do a search for “SWPUC” and they all pop up. What if I could have a saved search named “SWPUC” with all of the 6W Tag information completed, that I could select from my list of “saved searches?”
Most of the time that I go to the forum, it is for “browsing” – I quickly scan to see if there is anything interesting that I want to learn more about, or if someone is having an issue that I might be able to help.
This is where the platform really falls on its face – There is no jump to Sheet Metal or CAM or PDM, there is no FAQ, and, at best, there are a whopping 2 or maybe 3 posts visible at a time. On the existing forum, users have gotten better about creating a descriptive subject line, which makes it easy to quickly scan. The platform users have done a decent job with their subject lines, which means that the display could be limited to the subject line, and we would fit a LOT more content on a single page!
I don’t have a touch screen, I’m not accessing the platform from a tablet, which means I have to scroll an EXCESSIVE amount to see just a handful of posts.
As for the community sidebar, I like that you can add favorite communities, but I would also like the ability to “hide” the communities that I am not accessing on a regular basis. What if we added a third tab? Communities/Conversations/Categories – You could put the “Spaces/Groups” from the old forum under Categories.
I have a lot of requests that I am going to start adding to the platform, and we'll see what happens.
As of right now, this is the first thing that comes to mind when I open the platform –
This is what I really want to see -
Can we make it happen?
todd
