Blame the User Syndrome
My son, Daniel, uses ADT in his work as a
designer...but he is certainly more comfortable in 2D
AutoCAD. Recently, he called me up and asked me to
come to his office as he was struggling with his
recent upgrade to ADT 2007.
He had created a bunch of walls, but couldn't see
them (yes, the A-Wall layer was turned on). He
couldn't figure out the problem...I came in, sat down,
and switched his Display Configuration from Structural
to Medium Detail. Several walls appeared instantly
on the display.
He had defined several different wall styles, taking
care to assign materials and hatches as he wanted
them to appear. He then created a 2D horizontal
section of the basement floor from his 3D model...but
the hatching for the wall style did not match the
hatching he saw in his Plan view of the same wall.
Why not?
ADT makes it unnecessarily complicated...you define
wall styles, but then you have to go through all the
Display Configurations to make sure that objects
display properly in different views...throw in Layers
(which seem less and less important) and it can be
extremely tiresome.
Dan confessed to me that he will explode his 3D
model, so he can clean up problems like improper
hatching and clean up the way walls join at corners,
L intersections, and T intersections. I showed him
how to use the clean-up tool, but we both agreed
the results were often unpredictable and unreliable.
He asked me to teach him about Sheet Sets and I
went through my 5-minute spiel. He then explained
he doesn't use paper space. He works entirely in
model space, creates PageSetups for each sheet he
places in model space and then runs a batch plot.
I was taken aback...I thought only mechanical
engineers were afraid of paper space. I admitted to
him that he could not use Sheet Sets with the way
he currently works. He was OK with that as he does
not want to change the way he works.
He commented to me that ADT has a lot of nice
features. His impression is that Autodesk asked a
bunch of users what features they wanted and
Autodesk added them with little or no thought as to
the process or pain it would be for users to actually
use them.
In the end, I assured him that he had made the same
conclusion that alot of users make...that they are at
fault, when it is really the software. Software should
work the way users do...users should not have to
change their processes to accommodate their
software.
To see a sample of Dan's work, go to Page 112 of this ezine...
