ArchiCAD
ARCHICAD is an architectural BIM software developed by the Hungarian company Graphisoft. ARCHICAD offers computer-aided solutions for handling all common aspects of aesthetics and engineering during the whole design process of the built environment — extravagant or everyday buildings, beautiful interiors, huge urban areas.
ARCHICAD has been recognized as the first CAD product on a personal computer able to create both 2D and 3D geometry, as well as the first commercial BIM product for personal computers and considered "revolutionary" for the ability to store large amounts of information within the 3D model. Today, it has over hundreds of thousands of users and the company still has the strongest growth in its segment in the Nemetschek group.
WHAT
Native Mac and Win app
WHERE
Graphisoft
WHEN
1997-2015
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Project duration 18 years for me, the product still a market leader.
Yearly version releases
My Journey
I joined the company in 1997 as the second Human Interface Designer. The company was a startup at that time and I grew together with it for 18 years. The company success relied on ease of use from the beginning. Without having any other Product team my manager and I lead all the design efforts in a revolutionary field in architecture. The company is 10 times bigger now, grew from 50 to ~500 employees. We hired many designers and product managers. The design team today is about 20 people. Architects in 1997 used Autocad, simple 2D drawings, extremely labor intense way of blueprint creation. We designed a whole new world of 3D Virtual Building concept, which changed the whole industry.
The variety of project and problems I solved was so wide that work never became a routine. I worked together with my home University as well as with another university to teach human factors and do research experiments helping Graphisoft as well as the university. The projects I worked on, still a core part of the new functions or the whole framework. The company supported me to learn about my field all the time, experiment on new concepts and be successful in my endeavors.
We went through the evolution of many design approaches, tools, and processes. The key was involving the customer, engage across the whole organization. We brought them in the house to present their work to share their success and challenges as well. This way everyone was on the same page with the problems we solved. I brought my professors to educate developers on the UX field, continuously engaged them to push the limits of software, which won many awards. I have coached many juniors, who become excellent workforce on our field as well.
In terms of software delivery, we tried waterfall, lean, agile and many approaches. For complex applications like ArchiCAD, many times we had to define our special way to be efficient, lead the industry and generate buzzwords instead of following others. We had our own Cloud solution before it spread out, VR when it was only in labs, and the company thrives when others already disappeared.
Key to Success
I got out from the university with a Masters in Industrial Design, specialized to software ergonomics, but in terms of design, a huge lesson was when I could redesign my own design - you can read more about it under 3D Navigation. Editing complex elements challenge led me to design a hierarchical element editing framework, which spread out to many new ones. Project Documentation Navigation connects the 3D with the 2D world as well as different disciplines. Strong metaphors like toolbox got reinforced, but customization let people shape it to them. It would be great to be able to summarize the key to success in some sentences like:
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follow guidelines and principles
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focus on a real user problem and solve that
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know your competition, know the technology field
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be ahead of others
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invest in future
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learn, teach, challenge, be humble, but be ready to leap
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work diligently
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embrace your team
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...
I could go on forever and maybe I could make you believe that I know the secret sauce. I know my field and tried many approaches and I can pick the appropriate solution for a problem, but I think one of the biggest things in our success was that we meant when we said UX was important. We invested in UX, tried, failed, learned and never gave up.
Observe & Learn
If you talk to any entrepreneur nowadays you will hear fail fast all the time. Sure: do not be afraid of failures and do it fast, but for me, it is much more important to pay attention and learn. One time we figured out to bring the user into our design&development team and we let them do the prioritization. This idea was way ahead of the market. Usability was not really a buzz word that time, only in HCI conferences, but everyday products failed in a big volume and users blamed themselves and hated their lives. So we went bold and invited some of our users to our tables and let them decide which feature should go to a version. We believed this revolutionary idea will change how big tech companies will work. The users have spoken and we implemented their biggest priority feature (3D Document), which then we measured and learned: no one really used that feature. It was designed nicely, it is still available, it is easy to use, it was marketed, users asked for that but metrics showed it is not really used. Why? We learned that lesson in a hard way: people will ask for things they may not need. Sometimes they do not know what they need. If you ask them they may not even know what they use and definitely have no clue how they do it. Their mental model shows their desires, believes, but may not address any real problem. Listening is extremely important, but it is better if we do the decision making and design.
Other times users asked for something small (Layer dialog resize), which we have implemented and that small feature stole the whole show. We got a huge applaud for 2 hours of work and big projects got nothing. In that case, they did articulate the real problem and the implementation addressed an existing real problem.
So regardless of how someone calls it: user story, a requirement, I do my best to understand the real underlying problem and keep the priorities real. When I implemented something similar at other companies it worked as well. At Graphisoft, we introduced an easy to set up, but a really important value system to label, PM, user requests and each and every request had to go through as part of our process to have a UX value. A feature development had market value and development price tag on it as well, but usability value as well, which we use for prioritization.
Eye-tracking for detailed observation
Design & Development
Way before the agile manifesto was even published we had all the stakeholders at one table and we worked together. With a complex application like ArchiCAD designing the 3d editing plane or the 3d context sensitive pet palette, the recent trend of inVision or Sketch screen based apps would not help too much, and Framer did not exist (neither inVision or any other). So the most important design approach was to think together, talk a lot and use common languages like UML to connect the dots. We used Photoshop, but developers made an in-house dialog builder, which could be used by designers and align elements as we wished and that generated C++ code. As much as possible we used native system elements to be able to generate the application on both platforms (Win/Mac). Many of the abstracts were discussed in deep details in front of a whiteboard and got coded based on our agreements.
To bring other people into the conversations we sometimes had to generate some explanation movies, like the following complex editing one, which was a bigger challenge 15 years ago, so mostly we went with the "right" method (whiteboarding).
Delight with details
A long time ago we were limited in tools but we kept the bar high and we delighted our customers with all smooth details in delivery.
Enable Others to Succeed
The most important part of that journey that we enabled many other designers to succeed. Small, medium and large (Kajima Corporation has 15,000 employees and proud ArchiCAD users) companies to lead the world architecture using the software we designed and developed.