What’s New with User Experience, Education, and the User Community

By

If you follow any SOLIDWORKS fanatic on social media, you’ve probably seen the phrase “SOLIDWORKS is everywhere” over the years. The phrase takes on multiple meanings: from the products you create with SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD, to you, our amazing, worldwide user community.

Similarly, what “SOLIDWORKS” means to each of us is bound to be a bit different. In some senses, we’re talking about a software package when we use the term. For some of us, we think of where we got our start in engineering, or where we first started to feel we belonged within a professional community of likeminded peers.

Over the past few months on SOLIDWORKS LIVE, we’ve checked in on each of these aspects of the SOLIDWORKS experience – including “user experience!” In this article, we’ll provide brief teaser summaries of episodes pertaining to user experience, education, the user community, and more.

 User Groups, Content Creators, and SOLIDWORKS Champions

 
To end 2022, we had on multiple guests for a “Best of SOLIDWORKS” episode on SOLIDWORKS LIVE. This included content creators like JBV Creative, Rafael Testai, and Aryan of Think-CAD GmbH. It also included familiar faces such as Danute Petrova-Nikolova and Dan Wagner.

Regarding Danute: Danute is a SOLIDWORKS Champion who, like many users these days, hosted their own episode of SOLIDWORKS LIVE Design. In Danute’s case, this was an episode about designing inside SOLIDWORKS for 3D printing (specifically, FDM) applications. We discussed this episode with Danute, remarking humorously that user-hosted episodes outperformed SOLIDWORKS employee episodes this year!

Dan also joined us to discuss the importance of livestreaming content when it comes to keeping designers and engineers who use SOLIDWORKS up to date on the latest trends, modeling strategies, and much more. We also recapped one of the most viewed LIVE streams of the year with SLUGME7, the seventh yearly installment of the SOLIDWORKS Largest User Group Meeting Ever.

Education with SOLIDWORKS and 3DEXPERIENCE Edu

 
The only co-hosted episode of SOLIDWORKS LIVE was our Education and Early Engagement update, where we were joined by Marie Planchard, Senior Director, Early Engagement Ecosystem, 3DEXPERIENCE Works.

Marie and I traveled across the globe during this episode. We heard about the story of an 8-year-old User Group presenter in Armenia (Vahag Yurmuzyan), STEM education days in the UK performed by the team at Techwuman, all-electric FSAE cars at WPI in Massachusetts, and the Living Heritage Project (sponsored by Dassault Systèmes).

User Experience: one-on-one

 
On the SOLIDWORKS 2023 What’s New episode, I joked with my colleague Mark Peterson that the one experience common to all is “user experience.” And a month later, we did our first video podcast-style episode of SOLIDWORKS LIVE, when I sat down for a freeform conversation with SOLIDWORKS UX Director, Kevin Berni.

Within this episode, we covered a lot of ground. Kevin offered several personal insights on questions like:

  • What does the UX team do? And how is the UX team integrated into R&D?
  • Historically, what have been some of the hardest types of UX problems to solve?
  • When it comes to user input and feedback: How does the UX team use user feedback?
  • What is the importance of user feedback in terms of what we are doing in SOLIDWORKS R&D?
  • What are the ways the UX team is gathering feedback?
  • What are some of the biggest UX challenges the team is trying to solve today?
  • What’s really been top of mind?
  • How is the UX team handling its time and resources when it comes to SOLIDWORKS Desktop and  3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS?

Each of the episodes embedded above offer different perspectives on what is going on, worldwide, when it comes to “SOLIDWORKS” – whether we are talking about the software package, or the various types of user community members that call it ‘home.’

Just a reminder that our annual user event, 3DEXPERIENCE World is coming soon so if you haven’t already, be sure and register. Click here or on the banner below.

 

Sean O'Neill

Sean O'Neill

As an Industry Process Consultant, Sean's role is to help amplify the 'best of' both our products and our community, via the stories we showcase on our livestreaming programs (like SOLIDWORKS LIVE) and other digital outlets. Sean is also the creator of both the SOLIDWORKS Champions Program and the SOLIDWORKS Influencer Program.