Successful design strategies within challenging constraints at Autodesk Geospatial

Autodesk’s suite of geospatial products makes a difference in the daily lives of engineering professionals worldwide:
• Our Map 3D authoring product helps computer-aided design (CAD) engineers make the transition to geospatial mapping.
• FDO provides an agnostic middleware platform that connects to a full range of databases and file-based spatial data.
• MapGuide offers a web mapping development environment to implement spatial applications for distribution across the internet.

This workshop presents the challenges of creating usable interfaces for complex products that serve in highly demanding professional engineering environments. Add to that the challenge of designing with a distributed software development team and you have a recipe for potential disaster. Yet within this highly constrained environment, we have successfully adapted best practices to produce useful and satisfying user experiences. This is the face of the future in product design. It requires a rich set of skills that go beyond consumer-oriented applications and textbook processes.

Here is the workshop agenda:
• Initial product demonstrations to explain the Map-MapGuide suite of products.
• Presentations illustrate basic workflows performed by our users at sample customer sites.
• Process analysis shows the practical methods we have adapted to gather customer data and share it in an engaging way with the extended development team.
• Once the audience is somewhat familiar with the problem space, they will go through a series of heuristic evaluations and design problem-solving exercises. These exercises become more and more demanding as additional constraints are added to the design process.

Finally, for a change of pace, the workshop presents the challenges and rewards of working with a distributed design and development team. One team member who grew up in China and moved to the US will discuss his perspective. The Chinese audience will learn about what work is like for Chinese product designers at Autodesk, what joy they can get from work and what challenges they have to meet. This session will end with a group discussion in which the audience can share their experiences and solutions with global design. This workshop is ideal for professionals who want to learn more about a design environment different from consumer products and how to successfully adapt usability methods to the constraints of real-world development.