Inside Hues
Product Marketing Manager Lisa Crounse takes you on a behind the scenes tour of what goes into developing a new technology for Autodesk Labs. Lisa introduces you to members of the Impression development team and shares their unique ideas and insights.
Latest Post
- posted 12/22/06 by Lisa Crounse Jay is in the house - Product Designer Spotlight
- My last entry gave you a glimpse at some of the User Interface improvements coming soon to a technology preview near you. "Who figures out how that stuff should look and work?" you might ask yourself. (I used to ask this before I actually met software developers. Surprisieng, I know.)
At Autodesk we have teams of product designers who work with the developers to figure out how the heck this stuff should work. They do a ton of interviews and usability tests with customers just like you to see how people react to different designs and workflows.
Today I'd like to introduce you to Jay Behr who manages Product Design for Impression.
Q: Who are you and why are you here?
A: I was an architect with an interaction design background. I’d TA interaction design classes in Grad school at UCLA. During the tech boom, I made the transition to an instant messaging startup. Once I had a software experience, I worked back towards architecture and that brought me to Autodesk.
Q: What do you do as a product designer?
A: I manage the product design team as well as contribute as a designer myself. Everyone on my team draws on experience making real presentation drawings in the field to design easy to use features for Impression.
Q: What has been the most exciting part of working on Impression?
A: The best part has been seeing our user’s enthusiasm for the concept and later usability quality of Impression.
Q: What was the biggest challenge for Product Design?
A: Making often complex software easy to use. CAD drawings and CAD workflows are not simple, but we work very hard to make the user experience of making presentation drawings as simple as possible in Impression.
Q: What else should we know about you?
Over the last 4 years I’ve designed features such as the Sheet Set Manager, and Dynamic Input in AutoCAD and countless others. I also use Impression and AutoCAD in production on the design of my own house which I’ll break ground on this Summer. It’s good to eat your own dog-food, so to speak.
Coming soon to a blog near you...another sneak peek at what is in store for Impression...0 comments In Inside Hues >
Previous Posts
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The elves are hard at work
Posted 12/18/06 by Lisa Crounse
Its the week before Christmas and Santa's elves aren't the only ones hard at work. We've got some tenacious elves of our own, and they are hard at work building some goodies for the grown-ups. As I promised in my last entry, here is a sneak peek at some UI work which you will see in the next release of the technology preview. As Paris Hilton and Product Design Manager Jay Behr would say, "Its hot."
You've given us a lot of feedback on the style editing workflow. You told us that it takes a few too many clicks to edit styles and that the interface is a bit clunky.
Here's what it looks like in Technology Preview 2 (the release currently available):
Well, that will all change for Technology Preview 3. Here is the new improved version:
As you can see, style editing will now be done on a fly out menu. No more opening and closing the style editor. Yay!
Sure, there's lots more where this came from, but I can't show you everything in the next release at once can I? Frankly, it would be somewhat exhausting. Okay, I've got to run and figure out my defense plan. I think that I just refered to my team as elves, and I'm sure that won't be popular. May of them are over 6 feet tall. And I'm not.
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Developer Spotlight - Scott Morrison
Posted 12/12/06 by Lisa Crounse
Today I have the pleasure of introducing you to Scott Morrison. Scott is a software developer on our team and is lucky enough to work at home in beautiful Oregon. Although he's remote, he does adhere to the Autodesk policy of surrounding oneself with animals (see below).
Scott was kind enough to answer a few questions for me the other day.
Q: Who are you and why are you here?
A: Well, that’s a deep question. It all started 13.6 billion years ago with a singularity...Oh, I guess that’s too much information.
Basically I’m a nerd from way back. I taught myself BASIC in 1974, and I’ve loved to program ever since. I worked for almost 10 years in the math department at IBM Research and moved to Autodesk in 1993. After working on 3ds max for a long time our team was transferred to the Platform Technology Division to work on 3ds viz, and then Impression.
I work out of my house in Portland Oregon, and I’m a very happy guy. I sit all day at home coding cool graphics software. What could be more fun than that?
Q: What parts of the application do you work on?
A: I’m the lead user interface programmer and I implemented the Area Fill tool. I also had a hand in some of the basic software architecture which Impression is built upon.
Q: What has been the most exciting part of working on Impression?
A: Working on the Area Fill tool has been both frustrating and fun. In the early beta version of Impression I tried to use a “perfect” algorithm which computed all the areas in a drawing in a mathematically beautiful way. This was the planar map algorithm. Unfortunately this was slow and very difficult to code. Eventually floating point precision difficulties led to problems which could not be solved. Lots of people said to me “Well other applications can do this.” At first I’d reply that it’s a different problem in some other applications since theay are pixel based, and Impression is vector based. Then I had my “Aha!” moment: Why not compute the fill in pixel space and convert the boundary to vectors? I tossed out 3 months of the hardest programming I’ve ever done and started again from scratch. Now it works fast and reliably, and people love the tool. That’s exciting for a programmer.
Important Stats about Scott and Impression
Cats in Scott's office: 5
Lines of code in Impression: As of 12/12/2006, 787,056. It’s mostly in C# with some C++ and a smattering of C.
Stay tuned as my next entry will have a sneek peek at a new UI element in development for Impression.
Scott at home pondering what he can do next with the Area Fill tool.
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What did you do at AU?
Posted 12/06/06 by Lisa Crounse
For those of you that did not make it to Autodesk University this year - we missed you. For those of you who did make it - we hope that you have recovered! I'm happy to say that our entire team survived, although more than a few team members are a few pounds lighter. More on that later.
When we all got back into the office on Monday, I asked people "What was you most memorable moment of the show for you?" As you can imagine I got quite a mixed bag of responses.
Reported Scott Morrison, lead on the UI architecture for the development team - "While I was watching Todd’s demo in the exhibit hall, I heard the person behind me say “Wow, that really looks hand drawn!” (I'll interview Scott soon in this blog and you will learn about all the cool coding that went into the Area Fill tool.)
Travis Jones, who taught a hands-on lab class and two hands-on sessions in the AUGI play pen reported,
- In the AUGI play pen, when one of the students asked "is this for real?"
- In my hands-on lab when one of the students called the product "sweet"
Our Product Design team reported that they learned a lot from the one-on-one feedback sessions that they did with customers during the show. (Pictured above is team member Yan Shober, and an AU attendee) In these sessions, they observed first time users working with the product. They learned a ton about usability and are now working with the development team to integrate many of these ideas into Impression.
So, that's all great. Impression was impressive at AU, and we learned a lot from customers, but "where is the good stuff?" you are probably asking at this point. This was Las Vegas after all.
Jon Rossen, a software quality engineer reported having an out of body experience - " I was taking a 30 minute break and playing blackjack at the Venetian at the end of the casino closest to where AU was. As I was at the table playing, I looked up and saw Misha and Tim M. from the AutoCAD team walking through the casino as if they were on their way to an escalate meeting: Except, they were in a Las Vegas casino and not in San Rafael!! It was very strange, but after I saw them I quickly won $60 and then went back to AU and attending my class!!"
Who knew that AutoCAD team members carried with them so much good luck.
Our team also experienced a bit of bad luck at the show as four team members came down with horrific food poisoning. Sadly, this was the most memorable part of the show for many team members, and I could go on with details, but I'll spare you all that. I will say that they all learned the proper etiquitte for obtaining nescessary supplies from their seatmates on the plane rides home, "Excuse me, but are you planning on using your barf bag?" Great first impression, huh?
With that, I will offer you today's helpful hint - be wary of the chicken.