Model Viewer

A better model viewer

• Model Viewer is the highlight of almost every CAD tool. It usually has all the bells & whistles such as 'exploding' a model, rotating it to weird angles, drilling down searching for specific parts, filtering by metadata and way more.

• The Physna new React Model-Viewer has a unique feature. Users can click on a part right on the model and search for a similar parts in all of the models that are in their database (AKA 'Match'). But this is not the only thing that is unique, off that same part, users can filter by 'Part-Match' and that will show other models that this part is used in as well.

• Getting to understand this CUJ was a big hit and a huge win for us because customers today spend hours looking for parts and if they can't find it, they spend days recreating that same part/model they couldn't find.

Model Navigation

After getting the 'Find Matches' CUJ right, we headed to treat the other common features into a single right pane.

The biggest breakthrough arrived when we realized that users don't like to scroll the page (as in the legacy app) cause they lose context of the model while they're browsing for Metadata, Tags, etc.

We started with a non scrollable page with left and right panes, but then we decided to go with a left pane only both to allow more room for the model and also collapsable