top of page
Image by ThisisEngineering RAEng

Onshape for Education

What do students need from CAD? How is Onshape meeting those needs? What can they do to improve their software for students? This research explores these questions and seeks to provide research to improve Onshape.

My Role

  • User Experience Researcher

​

​

​

​

​

​

Methods

  • Experimental Design

  • Heuristic Evaluation

  • Contextual Inquiry

  • Persona Development

  • Qualitative Research

  • Usability Testing

  • Analysis and Presentation

Time

  • August 2021 - December 2021

​

​

​

​

​

Objective

To investigate the needs of students learning CAD and discover how well Onshape is meeting those needs and what improvements to Onshape will improve the user experience for students.

Process

Meeting with the Onshape team to discuss their needs

Persona Creation based on the contextual Inquiry

Performed a Heuristic Evaluation of Onshape and a competitor

Conduct usability testing

Contextual Inquiry to determine student needs from CAD software

Analyze and present test data

Background

CAD is the use of computers to create, model, analyze, or optimize designs. It is used in a variety of fields including engineering, architecture, and manufacturing.

Onshape logo.png

Onshape is a SASS computer-aided design software which uses cloud-based storage accessed through the browser. Onshape is advertised to be intuitive and streamlined.

The Focus

CAD is vital for engineers and is taught as a part of engineering degrees. Students needs are often related to learnability and cognitive overload, as they not only need to learn to use software, but they also need to learn to be engineers. This research investigated ways that software was missing those needs and how they could be improved.

Heuristic Evaluation

The Goal

To conduct a heuristic evaluation of Onshape and AutoCAD (a competitor) in order to understand potential issues that Onshape and other CAD software may cause users. During this evaluation, I also recommended potential solutions.

Process

Selecting AutoCAD as the competitor to analyze.

Examined the interface of Onshape and AutoCAD based on Heuristics

Evaluated the findings and compared the violations

The Heuristics

10 Heuristics.png

The Results

​Onshape's Eval:

  • Onshape only had a few major violations

    • When a user attempts to perform actions that aren’t possible, the system does not prevent them from doing so

    • The number of options in the toolbar may cause cognitive overload

  • Onshape had many minor violations

    • Not enough indication when actions fail or affect other parts

    • Undo is inconsistent

    • Lack of features to prevent errors

    • Toolboxes that look like popup boxes

    • Internal and external consistency violations

    • Some procedures needed to be memorized​

AutoCAD's Eval:

  • A few critical usability issues 

    • Consistent crashing

    • Crowded interface

    • Difficulty navigating

  • A large number of medium issues

    • Low-priority items taking up space on the interface

    • Complicated procedures

    • Unintuitive actions

    • Poor error messages

    • Cognitive overload from too many options

Conclusions

  • Overall, Onshape had more violations; however, AutoCAD’s major violations were more severe than Onshape’s major violations​

  • Many violations occurred in both tools, including cognitive overload from too many menu items, unhelpful errors, and having to memorize procedures

  • Onshape overcomes many of AutoCADs major problems by being a web-based software

  • Onshape’s interface has less cognitive overload than AutoCAD’s, and actions tended to be more intuitive

Download the Full Evaluation

Contextual Inquiry

The Goal

A contextual inquiry was conducted to determine CAD's place in an educational environment from both the instructor and student perspective. The interviews investigated what features students require, how students use CAD, what instructors need from CAD software and what challenges students and instructors face while learning and instructing CAD.​

Process

Prepare for contextual inquiry (design, recruit, etc.)

Conduct contextual inquiries with students and instructors

Create personas and an affinity diagram based on interviews

Methods

Participants

  • 3 students

  • 2 instructors

  • Students must have used CAD in at least 2 semesters of classes or for at least three months in a professional environment

  • Instructors needed to be current instructors who used CAD in at least one class

Questions

  • Inquired about participants’ experience using CAD

  • Instructors and students were asked about student learning needs

  • Inquired about students’ needs and where they felt CAD was lacking

  • Inquired about the challenges of using CAD

Affinity Diagram

An image of the main themes uncovered in the contextual inquiry, click to see the full affinity diagram.

Main themes.PNG

Personas

Instructor Iris was designed to represent the needs of an instructor who taught students CAD.

CAD instructor.png

Student Steve represents the needs of an engineering student who is beginning to learn CAD.

CAD student.png

Suggested Improvements Based on Findings

  • Students want better quality tutorial videos

  • A “read more” link to help documents in tooltips would be helpful to students

  • More descriptive errors would help students problem solve

  • Students would benefit from more view options

  • Adding more advanced features (such as those Creo has) would make Onshape more attractive to users

  • Examples of Onshape being used in industry would help students understand why features are useful

  • Students need improved visual quality of designs

​

​

​

​

​

​

Download the full report:

Usability Test

A remote usability test using the concurrent think aloud method where participants were asked background questions, to create a prototype in Onshape, and then asked questions about the experience.

Methods

Participant Requirements:

  • Have experience using CAD in at least two courses or for at least one course and 3 months in a professional environment

​

Successful Completion

Successful completion of task was measured as being able to replicate the prototype with the correct measures based on the given diagram

Diagram of shape.png

Data Collection

  • Frustration

  • Reactions

  • Participant Actions

  • Open ended questions and 5 point Likert scales

  • Participant errors

    • Any behavior where the participant begins to perform an action but starts over, backs out, or presses the undo button

    • Errors were also noted as when a participant expresses surprise or otherwise indicate the action they performed was unintentional

The diagram of the figure students were asked to create

Findings

Chart.png

Errors were caused by:

  • Misunderstanding of how tools or constraints function

  • Confusion of how the toolbox functions

  • Difficulty with rotation

  • Navigation

  • Poor attention to detail

​

Major Usability Defects:

  • Toolboxes frustrate users

  • Lag

  • The dimension tool is difficult to find

  • Making Onshape friendlier for small screens

  • Lack of advanced features

​

Medium Usability Defects:

  • Undescriptive error messages

  • Dimension shortcut is not intuitive

  • Lack of indication as to why the drawing is underconstrained

  • Lack of copy-paste

​

Minor Usability Defects:

  • There is not enough feedback when constraints are placed

  • Views in drawings don’t show interaction

  • There is no tooltip for constraints

  • Units of the drawing are difficult to locate

  • Discovering the rotation shortcut is difficult

  • No auto-rotate to planes for sketch

  • Easy to accidentally interact with other planes when sketching

  • Show/hide feature disappears from the menu

  • Not enough snapping features

  • No way to import images

Conclusion

  • Onshape does well in many areas where other CAD software are lacking

    • It has a clean user interface

    • Students would recommend Onshape to new learners

  • Onshape has some areas to improve upon

    • It needs more advanced features

    • Some of the tools are difficult to use

  • Onshape has some issues that are common across CAD software including

    • Difficult assemblies

    • Confusing error messages

Reflection

This research was a good opportunity for me to hone many of my skills as a researcher. Designing a semester-long research project allowed me to gain planning skills, as well as gain more experience balancing various stockholders needs (including several professors in my committee and the Onshape team). This project also taught me to be flexible. Originally, I wanted to interview 5 instructors, and 5 students for the contextual inquiry, but I was unable to do so within the timeframe and budget constraints of the project. Learning to adapt was an important lesson that has benefited me in industry, as often I will have a plan for a project that becomes altered based on outside factors.

bottom of page