SolidWorks 2008: Interface

SolidWorks Corp has given “the blog squad” (thanks to Jeff Mirisola for the picture) some advance access to info and permission to post it publicly. This seems to be the first valuable change in 2008. If you haven’t already noticed, the SWUGNsite has also linked out to the bloggers. I guess they are ready to admit that we exist. These are both things I have asked for, and I don’t know if that has anything to do with it or not, but I’m certainly glad for the access to info, the ability to comment on it and the extra exposure. I hope this is something that continues. In this case, I’m limited to using existing materials provided by SW Corp (I can’t use beta to create screen shots), but they have issued plenty of materials for us to be able to show some of the more important changes in the new version.

Ready or Not, Here it Comes

SolidWorks 2008 is coming. To me, this is a mixed blessing. I always love to get my hands on the new software, and I’m generally excited to see what is new. This release has a lot of very good news in particular for people doing assemblies, but the biggest changes are coming to the interface, and will touch everyone. An interface change always means a bit of a learning curve, and maybe some retraining. It will be up to you to decide how useful the changes are.

When will SW08 officially be released? As a guess (not official info), I would guess August, with SP0 DVDs arriving late August or September.

So, What’s the Big News?

The big news in 2008 is the interface changes. Let’s take a look. No, I don’t expect you to see it in the image above. Click on it to show the full image. It will open a new window, so you may need to tile or arrange windows so you can read while looking at the image. I’ll use details of this image to talk about the specific areas of the interface.

The first thing to notice is that the CommandManager has a new look and function. Instead of Icons in the old Control Area, it now uses tabs hanging off the bottom of the toolbar area. Some folks don’t use the CommandManager. It took me a while to warm up to it a couple of releases ago, but now (in SW07) I use it a lot, and like it. One of the things I like about it that is missing in this new interface is that the icons in the Control Area can be used as drop downs. The tabs don’t offer the ability to drop down. Minor point, but it’s still lost functionality.

Next, I think in the detail screen shot above, SolidWorks is trying to demonstrate that you can use icons with text under, text to the right or no text. Or maybe they are trying to emulate blog tags (as shown here on the right at CADJunky) that vary the text size of a tag by the tag’s popularity. The official SW handouts say “Common Operations Stand Out”, which can only be talking about the fact that some of the icons take up more space than others. Interestingly, there is a loss of functionality here, because the icons themselves cannot be shown in two different sizes as in SW07. Even when “Large Icons with Text” is selected in Tools, Customize, the icons are the same size as the small icons.

In any case, what I see is a disorganized mess. The good news is that you can make your interface consistant, regardless of which way you want to see it. But the bad news is that you will have customize it right out of the box because the default install combines all modes. When you scan information, it is difficult to shift between words and icons. Whatever you use, use it consistantly, don’t jumble it up. It is just too hard to read. When I look at this, I can feel myself mentally changing gears, shifting from graphics to text trying to understand what is going on.

The CommandManager in SW08 now takes up the entire row. This means that you cannot put other toolbars on the same row as the CommandManager like you could in SW07. For example, in SW07, I put the Standard Views toolbar on the same row as the CommandManager because I have a 24″ wide aspect monitor, and the CommandManager never takes up the entire width. Notice in the image to the left that there is a vast expanse of unused space now in the toolbar/CommandManager area that goes unused, and you can’t put anything there unless its in the CommandManager. …unused except for the new DS logo which is placed here…

Additionally, many SW07 users placed the CommandManager vertically on either the left or the right. You can’t do this anymore either, more lost functionality. Interfaces should be flexible because everyone uses them differently. SW08 is far less flexible than SW07.

The official SW materials for this claim “More screen real estate to design”. I don’t know about that. I see a lot of blank unused toolbar area and toolbars put into the graphics area. I would call that wasted space and a cramped work area.

On the plus side, adding new tabs to the SW08 CommandManager is easier than adding new toolbars in SW07.

Next notice that the Minimize, Restore and Close buttons have been moved from the Menu bar area to the graphics area. The buttons have been moved because the Menu bar is no longer there. You can access the menu using the arrow to the right of the SolidWorks name in the title bar, and the good news here is that the menu can be pinned in place to keep it open. A set of commonly used icons has been added to replace the menu, even though you cannot access all the commands of the menu from the toolbar.

I use the Avant web browser, and Avant enables you to put the menu bar in the same row as the toolbars, and actually allows you to put the Minimize, Restore and Close buttons on the same row as well. Click the image above to see this. This saves a lot of space, and doesn’t cramp the web viewing area. I personally think SolidWorks is being inflexible and obtuse by placing these controls in the working area. It’s a bad idea also because of all the other tools that are competing for space in that upper right corner of the graphics window. Come on guys, this requires a little more thought. I can see why the controls had to be moved, but not why they had to be moved there.

Notice that a new toolbar (which cannot be removed or edited) is also taking up graphics area real estate at the top center of the graphics window while there is this huge area of unused space in the toolbar area. This extra toolbar completely duplicates what most users have on their View toolbar already, plus it has buttons you (or at least I) never use, such as the rotate (middle mouse button), zoom (Z or Shift-Z) and pan (Ctrl-middle mouse button), but doesn’t have other buttons that you may want, so you can’t get rid of your View toolbar. What happens to all of this interface mechanics when you tile windows? Does it overlap? Disappear?

I think SW development in early beta forces users to deal with some of these issues just to get the feedback, knowing full well that they are later going to have to backpedal significantly. At least I hope that’s what’s going on. This toolbar, stuck in the middle of usable graphics space, is an unconscienable faux pas, particularly if it is forced on users. This thing has to go.

For the time being I only have one more comment on the interface. This is in regard to the new incarnation of Right Mouse Button menus. Essentially what they have done is to remove the most frequently used selections from the RMB menu and put them in a little toolbar above the menu, using only icons, no text. Remember the discussion above about the CommandManager and mixing graphics and text. Here it goes one step further. You have graphics only, graphics and text combined, and text only. Talk about shifting gears! Beyond that, it has some of the same problems as the new CommandManager in that in the new RMB menus you have to scan the vertical column as well as the 2-dimensional grid grouping of icons.

How many of you can identify all of the icons in the group? Probably no one, unless you’re a beta tester or SW employee. Can you spell “Tooltips”? If people are accessing tooltips to identify menu selections that you used to identify by sight (text), that is an inherent waste of time. First you have to scan the menu to see if the selection you want is in the menu, the phrase “most frequently used” being vague enough that it could mean simultaneously anything or nothing, besides meaning different things to different users. You find that what you are looking for is no longer in the regular menu, so you try to find it in the toolbar above the menu, but it has a new icon, and you don’t know what it is. So you use tooltips. The tooltips give the reassurance that you are selecting the right thing, but hovering is a waste of time. Why not just put the damned text back into the interface so it is immediately scannable.

I think the intention with the icons in the group is to shorten the RMB menus, and to minimize mouse travel by creating a higher density of commands per pixel. This is a great problem to try to solve, but it’s a bit like putting a bicycle lane on the interstate to improve gas mileage. Bikes aren’t used like that, somebody’s gonna get hurt. Great intention, wrong solution.

So, I think SW08 will be the great equalizer. Power users will be brought to their knees by this interface. Beginners will be on equal footing with the rest of us. Is this really what SW wishes to accomplish? Before this release, SolidWorks had over 500 icons. With this release that number goes up significantly, and now it matters if you know them or not. Also with this release, the interface is far less flexible – there are areas where you used to be able to customize where you can no longer do so. I get the feeling we are being fed one very pedantic view of interface design, and that there has been a lot of criticism which has been simply brushed aside, because the “powers that be” are not open minded about the criticism, and are completely wedded to this this wacky and wasteful arrangement. If the SW07 interface were translated into Swahili, I would eventually learn it and become used to running it, and maybe even like it. The new interface couldn’t be more of a change if it were actually translated into Swahili.

So in case you were wondering, no, I’m not too impressed with the new interface. It is a disorganized mess, and requires too much mental gear shifting between scanning for graphics and text, in 1-dimensional rows (toolbars) and columns (menus) or 2D grids (new toolbar and menu functionality). It will become more important than ever for people to simply memorize the interface, and I know this will cause me to make more use of hotkeys than ever.

I think CAD admins responsible for large installations are going to seriously balk before rolling this out to a large group of users. What are the benefits that come from these changes? Are they real or wishful thinking? Are they change for the sake of change, or does someone really expect this to be something positive? Initial productivity is certainly going to take a hit across the board. SW is betting on the changes being or becoming ”intuitive”, which I very highly doubt.

To be fair, I have talked to a couple of optimists among the blogger group who said that at first they didn’t like the new interface, but it grew on them over time. I’ve talked to one SW person in a very influential position who asked not to be named, but said he secretly dreaded the effect of the changes on the user base at large. I’m trying to be fair. If I say something is a disaster, I say why, and try to give examples. I don’t think I’m just being a stick-in-the-mud curmudgeon simply opposed to change in any form, I agree with what I think are the reasons for the changes, I just disagree with the conclusions they reached on how to do it. I don’t want to be thought of as bashing SW, but offering constructive criticism, including reasons and alternatives. This is a rational rather than an emotional rant.

There are several other interface changes which I can’t talk about at this point because they weren’t covered by the press release. Additionally, there were things that changed between beta 1 and beta 2 which roll back some of the changes to some extent. It was unclear whether the changes were intentional or bugs.

These interface changes are also interesting in light of John McEleney’s presentation at Charlotte, NC which I attended. He talked about the web interface book called “Don’t make me think”. John quoted the book as saying “Eliminate unnecessarywords”. The author seems to be making the point that an interface should be visual and graphic. I would agree, making the additional point that if you are going to mix metaphors, it is ok to have text menus and graphic toolbars, but mixing the two is a bad idea. John also spoke about the differences between how kids use a computer interface (for example, Cosmic Blobs, check out the interface) and adults. “Kids just jump in and start doing it. Adults want to know where the File menu is.” From the sounds of all that, aparently, SW thinks most of their users are in the 13-19 year old gaming demographic. Taking an academic look at the future is one thing. Building usable engineering software for the present, it seems, is entirely another.

Of course it is not the least of my worries what this new interface is going to do to the next version of the SW Bible. I’m going to have a pretty extensive edit on my hands!

Anyway, my idea of efficient interface design is clearly different from the folks at SW, at least in this latest incarnation. There will be additional parts to this report, focusing next on RealView Scenes and Appearances, Assemblies, Drawings and Sketching. I got most of the bad news out of the way first. In my opinion, Assemblies is the area that received the most useful enhancements.