📍 Project Context
As manufacturing increasingly moves toward digital and intelligent processes, CAD platforms have become essential tools for mechanical design teams. A critical step in this workflow is generating engineering drawings (2D prints), which communicate design intent to production, quality, and suppliers.
However, through customer feedback and support data, we learned that our existing drawing template module was creating friction. Engineers struggled to locate the right templates, admins faced cumbersome bulk imports, and overall, the workflow was slower and more error-prone than it should be. This posed a risk to both productivity and user satisfaction.
🎯 Objectives
We set out to:
Streamline the process of finding and applying drawing templates, cutting down time and mistakes.
Improve how users import and manage template libraries, with clearer guidance and feedback.
Deliver a smoother, more modern experience that boosts customer confidence in our platform.
👥 Who We Designed For
We focused on three primary user groups:
Mechanical Design Engineers
Use drawing templates daily to generate or revise engineering prints.
Expect to quickly locate the right standard, paper size, and language variant.
CAD Administrators
Manage large sets of company-approved templates, keep them updated, and handle imports.
Need reliable, transparent bulk operations.
External Partners & Suppliers
Often work across multiple standards (ISO, ANSI, GB) and languages.
Require clarity to avoid costly miscommunication.
🔍 How We Uncovered the Problems
We started by gathering evidence from multiple angles:
Interviews & shadowing: Conducted in-depth sessions with engineers and CAD managers at 15 manufacturing firms, mapping their workflows and common frustrations.
Surveys: Collected quantitative data from 68 companies to understand how widespread the issues were.
Behavioral analytics: Tracked time-on-task and error patterns inside the current template selection flow.
Several pain points emerged clearly:
💡 From Insights to Design Strategy
The core problems we identified:
The existing template list was flat and hard to navigate — no way to filter by size, standard, or language.
Users had to rely on file names alone, since there were no quick previews or detailed attribute tags visible up front.
The import process lacked progress indicators and clear success/failure statuses, leaving admins guessing.
Design principles we applied:
Information Architecture: We used card sorting and tree tests to identify the most meaningful categories — template type, standard, paper size, language — and built a multi-layered filter system.
Fitts’s Law & Interaction Efficiency: Placed high-frequency actions (like filters) on the left sidebar, and added hover actions (use, clone, delete) to minimize clicks.
Feedback & Control: Introduced visual upload progress bars, success/failure badges, and inline retry buttons, so admins stayed in control.
🚀 What We Delivered
Robust filtering & categorization
Let users instantly narrow down by standard (ISO, GB, ANSI, etc.), paper size (A0–A4), and language.
At-a-glance details & inline editing
Each template card now shows key attributes (standard, size, language, notes).
Notes can be edited directly without leaving the screen.
Bulk import with clear feedback
Drag & drop upload, with live progress tracking.
Success, failure, and pending statuses are all clearly flagged, with one-click re-uploads for failures.
A scalable component library
Built a flexible template card system with clear visual states (default, hover, click, busy).
Included variations for file statuses (success, failed, uploading) to handle edge cases smoothly.
Used consistent sizing, spacing, shadow elevation, and typography — ensuring new templates can be added without breaking the grid.
