1-Visitor

Question

WF5 Detailing UI

Forum|Forum|16 years ago
April 5, 2010
55 replies
24672 views

We adopted WF5 last week and I have had nothing but complaints from the user community regarding the increased amount of clicks to complete tasks. They have also found multiple problems using the show annotations tool. Does anyoneone have similar experiences or found ways to reduce the number of clicks in WF5 detailing.

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A.DelNegro

1-Visitor

In Office 07, you can switch tabs by scrolling the mouse wheel... not
so in Pro/E... again, another half baked solution...

A.DelNegro

1-Visitor

Chris, it's funny you mention "properties" placement on the RMB menu.
I've often wondered why "Delete" is the FIRST option. I know I've
accidentally hit that before. In the days before the undo button (which
wasn't that long ago) it could be a real pain.

The RMB menu is great, but there should be a little more thought put
into the ordering of selections. For that matter, it would be nice to
be able to customize it yourself.... Maybe in WF10 will be able to do
that.

T

PAULKORENKIEWIC

1-Visitor

Gee... I just want SOMEONE at PTC to explain to me HOW working on a Word
Document is "just like" working on a CAD drawing.... lol...

I know it's "nice" if your software is "easy" to learn and
"recognizable", but gimme a break! In the end, it's the EXISTING
customers who get screwed by PTC's desire to "lure" new customers...
Glad I'm old, and not long for any of this... ROFLMAO!!!

Opps, forgot to toggle the rant "warning lights"....

Thanks...

Paul Korenkiewicz
FEV, Inc.
4554 Glenmeade
Auburn Hills, MI., 48326

ptc-1932745

1-Visitor

Yeah, customizing the menus is a drum I have beaten for a couple of
years now.

My employer doesn't pay me to reverse engineer the Pro-E menu system, so
I haven't looked into it, but I would love to see the menuing 'open
sourced' and have the design community edit it as we like. Maybe you
can rearrange the menus now, IF you have a Toolkit licence(?)

Especially now that PTC changed the trail files to actually store
API-type of calls vs. mouse clicks, it should be a straightforward thing
to do...

Way back in the day, ComputerVision had a very good menuing system that
translated all screen-icon picks and tablet picks to command-line
commands. I keep thinking that even now, our UI's are still doing the
same general thing...

Also, with respect to the RMB menus, I seem to remember that DELETE was
right next to some other pick I use often.

Christopher Gosnell

TRIGON INC.
FPD Company
124 Hidden Valley Road
McMurray, PA 15317
PH: 724.941.5540
FX: 724.941.8322
www.fpdinc.com

jfrankovich

12-Amethyst

Anybody know how the Autocad community responded to their ribbon bar change?

[cid:image001.gif@01CAD64D.A9212CF0]

John Frankovich
The GSI Group LLC

RaphaelCNascime

1-Visitor

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to comment a little bit regarding the Wildfire 5.0
detailing UI and this lively discussion...

First of all, I'd like to say that I appreciate the candid feedback from
everyone who has taken the time to chime in. This kind of feedback does
help us to make improvements in the software.

In general, I'd like to explain a little bit about the thought process
behind the new UI in Wildfire 5.0 and how it fits in with our future
plans for the UI across the rest of Pro/ENGINEER. The decision to change
the top-level UI in only one mode of Pro/ENGINEER in Wildfire 5.0 was
not taken lightly. As some of the users have pointed out, the Ribbon UI
is a strategic direction for Pro/ENGINEER and we are planning to provide
the Ribbon UI across all of Pro/ENGINEER in Wildfire 6.0. Due to the
level of resources required we did not have the capacity to do it
completely in Wildfire 5.0. So the choice became to do nothing at all
regarding UI change and plan to do it all later, or to implement the new
UI in one area as something of a pilot. We opted for the second choice
for a several reasons. Chief among those was the realization that a CAD
tool is very different from an Office tool and requires a different user
model. We thought that by implementing the new top-level UI in one area
in Wildfire 5.0 we could get much more valuable user feedback from real
users using the tool in production than we ever could through usability
testing while Wildfire 6.0 was in development. That said, we did a LOT
of design and usability testing during Wildfire 5.0 development. We
implemented numerous changes to the design as a result of usability
testing on site at customers and at usability labs in the PTC/User
conference. Even now many of the comments being made about the detailing
UI in Wildfire 5.0 are influencing the design of the Ribbon UI in
Wildfire 6.0. Rest assured we are listening and taking these comments to
heart. The decision to implement the Ribbon in detail mode ultimately
boils down to the fact that we felt we could ensure a better user
experience in Wildfire 6.0 if we implemented the Ribbon in a limited
area in Wildfire 5.0.

Some specific comments regarding Wildfire 5.0 and the detailing UI...

One of the biggest complaints has been the notion of needing to be in
the proper tab to get access to all of the needed commands. One of the
key precepts in the design was to provide an optimized environment for
performing a set of related tasks. The different ribbon tabs are
task-oriented. There is a tradeoff in that switching tabs involves an
extra mouse click. However, we feel that if we can make the user more
productive when performing related tasks in a particular tab it would
more than make up for the burden of switching tabs. Case in point is the
RMB menu. In Wildfire 4.0 we only had one mode, so the RMB menu needed
to be a balance of providing commands related to views, dimensions,
tables, etc... while at the same time not having an RMB menu with 20
commands in it. By making the RMB menu contents reflective of the active
tab, we are able to provide far more commands in the RMB menu than
before. The Annotate tab has more RMB commands related to annotations
than were previously available in the RMB menu in Wildfire 4.0, for
instance.

We've received several comments from users regarding what they thought
were "new " commands, but which were in fact available in Wildfire 4.0,
but hardly anyone knew about them because they were buried in the menus.
Just by moving the command to the Ribbon, more people know about that
command and can find it now.

We did implement keyboard shortcuts to switch tabs. This is activated by
pressing and releasing the ALT key. Not only can you switch tabs with
these key tips, but you can even choose commands that way.

Mapkeys have been designed to work outside the active tab as well as to
switch tabs. So, if you find that you have a command that you use often,
you can record a mapkey for it and it will run regardless of which tab
is active.

Someone mentioned customization of the ribbon. We did implement some
limited customization in Wildfire 5.0, but plan to offer much more
customization capability in Wildfire 6.0.

The ribbon can be minimized to clear up screen space - I think someone
mentioned that as well.

I could probably go on about other specifics, but I really wanted to
point out the thought process behind the UI decision and how it fits in
with a longer term strategy.

Thanks for your time and if anyone has additional comments, feel free to
email me.

Raphael

Raphael Nascimento

Product Manager

Pro/ENGINEER Detailing

www.ptc.com

pgress

1-Visitor

On 04/ 7/10 05:00 PM, Nascimento, Raphael wrote:
>
> Some specific comments regarding Wildfire 5.0 and the detailing UI...
>
> One of the biggest complaints has been the notion of needing to be in
> the proper tab to get access to all of the needed commands. One of the
> key precepts in the design was to provide an optimized environment for
> performing a set of related tasks. The different ribbon tabs are
> task-oriented. There is a tradeoff in that switching tabs involves an
> extra mouse click. However, we feel that if we can make the user more
> productive when performing related tasks in a particular tab it would
> more than make up for the burden of switching tabs. Case in point is
> the RMB menu. In Wildfire 4.0 we only had one mode, so the RMB menu
> needed to be a balance of providing commands related to views,
> dimensions, tables, etc... while at the same time not having an RMB
> menu with 20 commands in it. By making the RMB menu contents
> reflective of the active tab, we are able to provide far more commands
> in the RMB menu than before. The Annotate tab has more RMB commands
> related to annotations than were previously available in the RMB menu
> in Wildfire 4.0, for instance.
>

I believe what would be a good compromise is when I double click on a
dimension in a different tab, it would automatically change to the
correct tab and also let me change the dimension value. It was this way
in WF4, just without tabs. Now this way all previous ways to do things
pretty much remains the same and now the new user interface is still usable.

> The ribbon can be minimized to clear up screen space -- I think
> someone mentioned that as well.
>

I've mentioned this in the past, from a different forum. But, a config
option would be very useful to have it minimized from the start, this
way you maximize user space, which should be the default.

Paul

--

Paul Gress
President
Rad Electronics Inc.
3122 Expressway Drive South
Islandia, NY 11749
(631) 243-7707
(631) 243-7708 Fax
www.rad-electronics.com

jflores-3

1-Visitor

Thanks for the update Raphael,

I would be very appreciative of a config option to turn off the icon
names. Currently the limited customization allow you to reposition the
icons to ones liking, but the ones with long names take up to 2-1/2 icon
spaces. Currently not all icons have a name, I can see where a name on
each icon would be very beneficial to new uses, not so much to old
timers.

Thank you, Jim Flores

Mech. designer/CAD admin.

Clinical Care Systems

Philips Healthcare

2271 Cosmos Court

Carlsbad, CA. 92011

-

ocorten-2

12-Amethyst

Hi Raphael,

Thanks a lot for joining this discussion. This shows how dedicated PTC
is at listening to their customers.

One of *my* biggest complaints for now is about the position of the
standard File, Edit, View menu's.
With the Ribbon UI they were moved to the top *right* side of the
screen. They were obviously moved over there to save valuable screen
space.
But that is not intuitive at all. I know of *no* other Windows
application that has these commands in an other corner than the top
*left* corner.
Also some of these commands will be only available in a flyout menu on
smaller screen resolutions:

I was also told that these standard menu's will be gone in future
releases of ProE anyway.
With that I have to disagree completely. The fact that Microsoft decided
they didn't need them anymore in Office should not be the reason to
remove them from Pro/E. The idea behind the Ribbon Interface was to
simplify the command structure to a more taks based structure where you
just simply follow the task in the tab's from left to right and then
your finished. But working with 3D and 2D CAD is way more complex than
working with Office documents.

I think that PTC should keep on concentrating on an multi driven User
Interface with

*
General menu's: File, Edit, etc (with all the commands and
additional commands provided by toolkit applications)
These should be placed in the top left corner.
*
Toolbars (with the most important commands)
*
Ribbon UI (with all the commands)
Including a lot of the optimizations suggested by the users.
Like a quick Ribbon UI close/open button.
*
Dashboards
*
Mapkeys

To underline my idea. Here a Photoshopped version of the WF5 Drawing UI
as I would prefer it with the standard menu's in the top left corner and
a quick Ribbon UI toggle button.:

Olaf Corten
CAD/PLM Manager, Besi Competence Center - Other Business Applications
Fico BV, Ratio 6, 6921 RW Duiven, The Netherlands
Tel.: +31 26 3196215
Fax: +31 26 3196200
Mobile: +31 644548554
www.fico.nl

Ken.L.Nunn

5-Regular Member

I absolutely agree with Olaf .

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