Overview
Product Information
Revit is a multidisciplinary building information modeling software for architects and engineers.
BIM 360 Design is a design collaboration software enables multiple users securely co-author a Revit model in real-time across one firm or multiple firms.
Background
Revit model upgrade used to be a time-consuming task. And it becomes the barrier for the customers to adopt the latest release of Revit in their on-going projects, which is not the way we want. Thus, it comes the idea of creating a cloud service that helps our customers upgrade their Revit models in the background, enable them keep using the latest release of Revit, which has the new features and bug fixes.
My Role:
UX Designer
UX Researcher
UI Designer
Design Process
I was the sole UX designer in an agile team with 3 developers, a product owner, a scrum master, and a quality engineer. I was responsible for determining the overall design direction while collaborating with the rest of the team to drive the successful implementation of the design. My work can be divided into four phases.
1. Discover
At this phase, I worked closely with the product owner to explore Revit+BIM 360 ecosystem current state. And I conducted user interviews to validate our hypothesis and understand users’ pain-points. Then I conveyed the findings to the team, helping the whole team stand on the same page. In order to foster user-centered design thinking across the entire team, sometimes I invited engineers to join research activities.
Revit+BIM 360 Ecosystem Current State
User Needs Exploration
A quantitative survey conducted to develop a better understanding of the scenarios and requirements for upgrading the Cloud Workshared projects.
Several face-to-face and remote in-depth interviews carried out to learn users' current workflows, pain-points, and needs.
Despite the importance of business requirements, I kept my initial interviews pretty open-ended to really understand what the users' goals are, what their frustrations are, and what they say about the current product.
Key Findings:
“I would really like to see the time for this whole [upgrade] process to be reduced. ”
We need to pay special attention to how we establish and maintain trust when changing customers’ files during the upgrade process.
We need to mitigate the impact on ongoing projects.
The current upgrade process takes the blame for numerous issues:
It takes a lot of time and can issue lots of warnings and errors.
No easy way to find out what has been changed in this process.
To figure out the linking relationship and re-link the cloud models is complicated and takes a lot of time.
2. Strategize
At this phase, I synthesized what we know about the problem and proposed possible solutions to the team, then verified the design proposals with our sprint demo customers.
* Some features are being implemented by the Nexus team and will be available in future releases. Unfortunately, I cannot share the plan and its features publicly.
Desired User Experience
Based on the findings from the Discover phase, I came up with the ideal workflow.
Balance User Needs and Engineer Resources
At this point, I synthesized and shared the research findings with the team members. For this highly technical project, I led the team discussion and the Importance Difficulty Matrix exercise to prioritize the potential features. The activities kept all team members stand on the same page, and the results helped our team to make a development plan.
3. Develop
The detailed design was created at this phase, followed by several iterations based on the results of the user research sessions.
High-fidelity User Interface Design
The goal was to design a user-friendly workflow for the targeted customers to upgrade their RVT files through BIM 360 Design smoothly. I followed the BIM 360 design guidelines and designed the user interfaces in Sketch and created a clickable prototype for usability testing.
Collect User & Stakeholder Feedback
I presented the design with the scrum team and our stakeholders in Design Studio to gather feedback and led five remote usability testing sessions for two iterations. We have been collecting user feedback at our team’s regular customer sprint demos.
User Experience Outcome
The following features were released to the public with the Revit 2019.2 release.
Fully automated cloud data migration between major versions of Revit
Cloud Model Upgrade enables users to use Revit features and enhancements as soon as they are available without having to update existing projects in older versions of Revit manually.
Test upgrade
Click “Test Upgrade” button to receive a detailed report of the changes that will occur during the upgrade process, so that the project admin can better communicate with project teams beforehand.
Detailed upgrade report
When the Revit cloud model upgrade is complete, the Cloud Upgrade Service will provide a detailed upgrade report. It can help users identify and fix the warnings and errors in the models.
Email notifications
Email notifications will be sent out to project admins to report the upgrade status. From the email, click Review to see the latest models in Document Management.
Identify changes in the model
Users can use the version compare tool in BIM 360 to highlight the differences between two Revit versions.
4. Monitor
Pre-release Test
Before we released the cloud upgrade service to the public, the BIM 360 Technical Preview was published to a group of Revit users to collect feedback and data for internal analysis and feature improvement.
Data Analysis
Data was tracked through the BIM 360 Techical Preview to the public release. It helped to learn about the performance of the upgrade service and the usage of each function. It also helped us dig out more user needs for future planning.
Upgrade Service Data via ADP and Splunk
This feature has been well received since the official release. The Cloud Model Upgrade service fully automates upgrading all cloud models in a BIM 360 project with the click of one button. It is reliable with 99.9% uptime with upgrade success rate >95%. It is an incredible time-saver that simplifies and streamlines the move to the latest Revit version, and a real value-add for using Cloud Models.
Start a New Round…
After the launch, I have started a new round of user research plan, in order to investigate how to improve Revit Cloud Model Upgrade in the next release.