USER EXPERIENCE
AUTOCAD 360 ACCURATE INPUT KEYBOARD
Company:
Autodesk
Product:
AutoCAD 360 Mobile
Year:
2015
My Roles:
Interaction Design, UI Design, Icon Design
The Challenge:
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Using OS keyboard takes up much space and is not flexible enough to support the specific requirements of inputting measurements for a plan.
The keyboard needs to be flexible enough to support both metric and imperial measurements (centimeters/meters and inch/feet), and in some cases unique measurements such as angles.
It also shouldn’t take up too much of the screen, on tablets or on phones.
Input required validation or interpretation of user input to make sure it makes sense as a measurement.
Previous keyboard solution displayed the output on the drawing itself, but several issues arose from this behavior (loss of orientation in the drawing, the measurement display exiting the screen, UI disrupted viewing the drawing), these issues needed to be solved as well.
The measurements keyboard needed to take up little space, be phone and tablet compliant
and support both metric and imperial units
Process:
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The accurate input keyboard existed for a while in the app before this redesign, and usability testing observations showed several issues that needed to be addressed. Some users did not realize they could edit the measurements, validation had some quirks, and compatibility with regional units preference was limited. We iterated on location of the keyboard, its layout and emphasis on different buttons, as to be clear and prevent errors, and how the keyboard affects the view on screen.
Solution:
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The keyboard was changed to open as soon as the user starts drawing and placed at the bottom of the screen to support both right handed and left handed use. The input boxes were removed from the drawing and added to the top of the keyboard area. The keyboard was made to match that of a standard keyboard to improve familiarity, and an additional column of buttons was added to the imperial keyboard, to support characters such as <’>, <”>,</>.
Validation rules were improved, to prevent inputting erroneous values. Values on the drawing itself were still tappable, but did not hide or disrupt the drawing.
Metric keyboard: Has decimal point, simpler layout
Imperial keyboard: Characters to support multiple ways
to enter data, more complicated numeric display and validation