Helping manufacturing partners review 3D parts and acquire orders on-the-go

For Hubs manufacturing partners (MPs) the 3D part viewer is vital in the acquisition and production stages of an order. Before accepting an order MPs need to review the parts to check whether they have been correctly designed for manufacturability (DfM) and if they're actually manufacturable within their own production capabilities.

Once an order has been placed by a customer on the Hubs platform, selected MPs from a global network will be allocated and given a short window of time to review and respond. Due to this time constraint and MPs adopting more modern machinery and processes, we have seen a growing trend of usage from mobiles/tablets. This indicates that MPs are now reviewing and responding to more orders whilst away from their desktop and working environment.

Currently the 3D part viewer is housed within a space constrained modal with only a small amount of space dedicated to examining the 3D model and its DfM analysis.

The experience on smaller screens is in a pretty dire state. With the tool bar and DfM analysis being completely unusable on both landscape and portrait mobile screens.

We already knew that most of the features within the 3D part viewer were unusable on touch devices as they had previously been developed to only work with mouse and single click interactions. This meant that a large amount of testing and development time within the scope of the project will need to be devoted to making key features work with more commonly known touch and gesture based interactions.

Through interview sessions with both MPs and customers we were able to understand which features they were struggling with most and which ones they have less interest of using on touch devices. This allowed us to prioritise which features to address first and give us more time to allocate to other improvement such as UI.

The tool bar consists of multiple actions, with each one currently having varying styles and visual treatments. The toolbar itself becomes cluttered and in the worst cases overlapping and unusable once viewing on smaller screens.

By looking at various 3D CAD/CADD programs used by Mechanical Engineers (our users), it was clear that there were industry standard icons that could be used and easily understood for the viewer options. By replacing the text for 'Solid', 'X-Ray' and 'Wireframe' with icons we were able to decrease the overall width of the toolbar, creating a consistent visual language for all actions with the titles appearing on hover for non touch devices.

A fully responsive and scalable design allowing our Manufacturing Partners to respond and acquire orders on-the-go. We can already see that this has significantly reduced time and effort taken to analyse customer parts, leading to an increase in the average number of orders responded to and accepted by our Manufacturing Partners.

But this is only a small part of a much larger plan to improve our Manufacturers experience on the platform…