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We are happy to announce the new Windchill Customization board! Learn more.

Windchill 10.0 UI Improvements

MichaelP.Hayek
1-Newbie

Windchill 10.0 UI Improvements

Windchill gets a major facelift in Windchill 10.0.

The most immediately noticeable improvement is the more modern, clean, and crisp color scheme and redesigned icons. Windchill 10.0 uses a fancy, sophisticated, and dynamic widget set.

The next most noticeable thing is the Navigator component. You, the users, have told us that you very seldom use the navigation links. So, we got them out of the way. Navigation and Search are now performed in the Navigator. This will make the search results always available.

Next are the table improvements. Tables are a major data presentation component in Windchill and we have significantly improved their usability and functionality. Here are but a few of the improvements:

  • Tables never overflow the page. That is, if a table has more columns than can fit in the browser page, you will use, not the browser’s scrollbar, but the table’s horizontal scrollbar to see those columns.
  • The Table View dropdown is always in View.
  • Create Views more dynamically by hiding, resizing, and shifting columns then hitting “Save View
  • Scrolling rather than Paging. Scrolling is more natural for users. After all, that’s how Microsoft Excel works. We have made significant performance improvements to make scrolling possible. (But note that because of physical limitations on client machines, we cannot throw an infinite amount of data at them. Therefore, we will resort to paging after a few thousands rows of data.)
  • Search in table helps users quickly find data in large tables. This allows you to display only those rows that match the criteria that you type in the filter box.
  • Tables will size themselves to the available space. That is, tables will grow and shrink (to display more or less rows) to fit the vertical space available on the page.

Other improvements include:

  • Breadcrumbs: These will orient users as to where they are in the application and allow them to quickly get back to where they came from.
  • Header and Footer: To declutter the UI, the page footer was removed and all the header links have been consolidated under the “Quick Links” menu.
  • To make it clearer for the user and the system what to search on, a Search Type drop down is added to the header.
  • And speaking of search, the search UI also got a significant facelift. The Search UI is significantly streamlined, modernized, and configurable to users’ preferences.
  • Windchill 10.0 provides a “Search History and Saved Searches” page. This page will show a list of the recently executed searches and the list of the user’s Saved Searches.

. . . and the list can go on, and on, and on!

9 REPLIES 9

This is great news Michael! Especially the preprod release!

Any chance of posting some pictures of Windchill 10.0 for those without a server or time available to load the Preprod software?

Thanks and I look forward to more great news!

Joshua - I can do better than pictures. See this.

Nice video! I think that's the fastest demo I've ever seen from PTC!

Love the new column chooser as well as the customized tabs!

One more comment on that video about something that really bugs me.

The new icons are pretty and all, but it's going to 1. Increase adoption time by users and 2. Cost my company more time and money to update documentation.

The most common complaints I hear for new releases is "Why did they rename something that does the same thing?", and "Why did they change the icon?".

After all this time, I still slip up and say "Redefine" as opposed to "Edit Definition" in Pro/E...ooops, I mean Creo.

Point taken... We are creating some job aids that will help in the transition from previous releases to 10.0. We will consider adding a referemce page that maps old icons to new icons.

While Windchill 10.0 looks very different, it really isn't. And that's on purpose as we were very conscious of the retraining concerns and did not want to alienate all the current users. Our research indicates that Windchill 10.0 is easily learnable and we hope that will turn out to be universally true. We are creating a couple of job aids that will help: 1) the "Windchill 10.0 Quick Start Guide" (which will be updated for the production version) and 2) the "Welcome to Windchill 10.0" screen.

Thanks Michael,

the document's looking good. One thing I occassionaly get lost on is Local/Server workspace information and especially recognizing that I'm seeing something in the commonspace or workspace.

CAD document and Viewable icons are still bugging me, but I'd really like to see some other people's comments on here.

Thanks,

Josh

I have not looked at it in 10. But in 9.1, folks new to the UI, always have issues decerning commonspace from workspace. Coloring, styling, or icons, not just changing what appears in menus is useful feedback PTC needs to consider. I'd suggest this at the upcoming TC's, but I may not be able to go.

Looks great! Can't wait to hear some comments from people at companies who implement it.

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