Top Ten Enhancement Request List for SolidWorks World

 Every year at SWWorld, in the final general session on Wednesday morning, from the big stage they announce the “Top 10 Enhancement Requests”. Last year, the #1 enhancement request was “Dual Monitor Support”. Huh?!? Of all the things you could ask for, why that? There were all sorts of right and wrong explanations or speculations about how that happened. In the end, what it showed was that the process SolidWorks uses for prioritizing customer requests resulted in bizzare conclusions.

Here is a capture of the current state of things on the Top Ten List. Stuff is fuzzed out so you can go to the site yourself and see what it is. Plus, if I just posted everything here, no one would need to go to Orlando to see it. Anyway, its fuzzed out, deal with it.

Anyway, I’d love to take credit for the turn around this year to something exactly like I asked for, but I’m sure I had nothing to do with it. I asked for, in fact I made a lot of noise almost demanding that SW do something like a “wish list” that was transparent and user-based. I wanted users to nominate topics, and then users to vote on the topics.

Imagine my surprise when a couple months ago, SolidWorks introduced “Brainstorm”, which selects the SolidWorks World Top 10 Enhancement Requests from a list compiled and voted on by users. Geez, this sounds familiar, but I really like it. I think the feedback they get is valuable, and because it is transparent they don’t just get static feedback, but peer review and discussion of the ideas. I don’t know what kind of info they got before, but I highly doubt that it came any where near the quality of the data they are getting now.

Dual monitors still makes the list, but it is down where it belongs, around #8, not on top. This list reflects the  reality I run into at user groups, not the fairy-tale you get when you don’t have users selecting the list. For example, I don’t see “gut the interface again” or “give us another half-baked rendering program” or “make the software think for me because I’m so stupid” or “automatically move parts in my assembly because I don’t really know where they should be anyway” on the list.

Also, the very presence of one item on the list shows that something is seriously different about the list this year. Notice at #3 you have “SolidWorks backwards compatibility”. Until this year, SolidWorks has never EVER even admitted that such a thing as backwards compatibility even existed. It has been one of those “head in the sand” topics. And now for it to show up so high on a list that they pride themselves on implementing 80% of each year… well, this really is ground breaking. (Other head in the sand topics are anything that tries to give users options for subscription, and product documentation).

Someone is going to expect this is the part where I chow down on a fistful of crow because if SW implements backwards compatibility it will be because they listened to users, right? I’m always arguing that SW is driven by competitors, not customers/users.  I think as this plays out you will see that’s exactly what’s happening here. The SolidWorks bus is driven by competitors even though it looks like users are driving the change.

SW knows backwards compatibility is important to users because they have all of this survey data that they don’t make public. But this year, something is different, something is forcing their hand. The rejuvenation of direct editing, and the mostly unsung implication that direct editing obviates the problems of backward compatibility means that SW has to start acknowledging that backward compatibility is indeed a technical possibility. Read this.  It turns out that Jeff’s source was just a public thread on Twitter where Hirschtick was thinking out loud about the topic. Read it from the bottom up, Twit style.

So. Direct Editing has a resurgence. Direct Editing doesn’t have any problem with backwards compatibility. SW is forced to admit backwards compatibility exists, because you can’t let a competitor have something like that without SW also having it.

Anyway, SolidWorks Brainstorm is a useful wish list format enhancement request voting site. If you haven’t visited the site and weighed in on your favorite enhancement requests, this is a great time to do that. Click on the Top Ten List banner above. And to whoever didn’t stand in the way of this bit of common sense data collection at SolidWorks, you have my hearty thanks. I really hope this is continued after SolidWorks World. It hasn’t received much publicity, but in my view, it is one of the most positive research methods that SW has ever used.