Don’t Confuse Change with Progress

I think the existing users of Revit are on to something. There’s a great book by Malcolm Gladwell called Blink that goes into some depth on intuitive thinking. The book isn’t suggesting that people stop ‘thinking‘. What it’s suggesting is that people with experience about something have the ablilty to instinctively “know before they know.”

Many existing Revit users are finding the new user interface to be a move in the wrong direction. So let’s quantify this intuition with regard to the redesign of the Revit 2010 UI. I’ll start with a comparison of completing some of most common tasks in Revit 2009 to completing those same tasks in Revit 2010 using Autodesk’s own data (the video can be found here) which starts by quantifying the most frequent user tasks in Revit. Here’s a screen capture from that video:

So by comparing common tasks, I’ll illustrate why the new users are not just intuitively – but also quantifiably correct. The new interface isn’t just unfamiliar because its new. It’s that the expression of creating something as complex as a building defies the overly simplistic metaphor of a “ribbon” that by design constantly hides and subjectively contextualizes both elements and their modifiers.

Link to Part 1
Link to Part 2

And let’s not even get started into the discussion regarding the creation of a UI based upon the measuring the “most common” tasks. If frequency = functionality, the cancel, delete and undo functions represent nearly 75% of the value of Revit. And this is certainly not the case.

>Don’t Confuse Change with Progress

>I think the existing users of Revit are on to something. There’s a great book by Malcolm Gladwell called Blink that goes into some depth on intuitive thinking. The book isn’t suggesting that people stop ‘thinking‘. What it’s suggesting is that people with experience about something have the ablilty to instinctively “know before they know.”

Many existing Revit users are finding the new user interface to be a move in the wrong direction. So let’s quantify this intuition with regard to the redesign of the Revit 2010 UI. I’ll start with a comparison of completing some of most common tasks in Revit 2009 to completing those same tasks in Revit 2010 using Autodesk’s own data (the video can be found here) which starts by quantifying the most frequent user tasks in Revit. Here’s a screen capture from that video:

So by comparing common tasks, I’ll illustrate why the new users are not just intuitively – but also quantifiably correct. The new interface isn’t just unfamiliar because its new. It’s that the expression of creating something as complex as a building defies the overly simplistic metaphor of a “ribbon” that by design constantly hides and subjectively contextualizes both elements and their modifiers.

Link to Part 1
Link to Part 2

And let’s not even get started into the discussion regarding the creation of a UI based upon the measuring the “most common” tasks. If frequency = functionality, the cancel, delete and undo functions represent nearly 75% of the value of Revit. And this is certainly not the case.