Pad 09 - FreeCAD UI Improvement

Goal

What do you want to achieve and why?

• Find bad UI elements in Freecad to improve the user experience

Action items

What needs to be done? List the Tasks!

• Idea Harvesting
• Brainstorming

People and their roles

Who contributes to this unit? What’s his/her role?

Pierre is starting to work on FreeCAD UX improvements for Ondsel from tomorrow!

Other pads

Documentation

The discussions brought attention to several things that could be improved :

1. The workbench selector is difficult to handle for new users:
   • The fact that there is so many different workbenches is confusing.
   • Draft vs Sketch
   • Part vs PartDesign

2. The toolbars are a overwhelming for new users. A ribbon interface could be more intuitive. It is used in most other CAD (Fusion360, solidworks…)

3. Tooltips could be improved to have pictures. It could help new users vizualise very easily what the tool does.

4. Constraints could have tooltips to show the formula used.

5. The design: colors used, icon sets and so on can be better. The fact that icons style vary between workbench is not good.

6. Some tools are not very intuitive.

How to bring changes to the UI considering how controversial it is?

Summary

Results

What did you accomplished? Reflection of current pain points, possible process, long-term vision and hinderances.

Next steps

What needs do be done after this hackathon? Put pressure on the FPA to make FreeCAD development more agile!

Open questions

How to speed up merging PRs.

Links

Issue tickets etc.