ZIXEL CAD

By the numbers

What the redesign moved

The problem

Tools that demand a manual

Professional CAD carries an old assumption: real power requires a training course. Zixel CAD’s engineering drawing workflows had inherited that tradition. The capability was there, but engineers had to already know where everything lived, and the cost showed up as slow onboarding and tasks that stalled partway through.

I joined as UX Designer in December 2024 with a clear brief: redesign the drawing workflows from the ground up, and shape the UX for a new tier of expert-grade analysis features. I ran this redesign alongside my role at MML. My bar for both jobs was the same — an engineer opening the tool for the first time should produce correct work without reaching for documentation.

Research

Interviews, and a hard look at the field

I ran roughly 30 user interviews, mostly watching rather than asking. Where an engineer hesitated told me more than anything they said afterward, and hesitation almost always traced back to ambiguity: an unlabeled mode, a value with unclear units, a result with no visible cause.

In parallel I benchmarked SolidWorks, Onshape, ZWCAD, and other major CAD platforms — never to copy, but to map the conventions engineers carry between tools:

• Honor the conventions that work; break the ones that exist only by habit.
• Pressure-test every decision against that competitive baseline.

None of this happened solo — I pressure-tested directions with Zixel’s engineers and PM during the interview round, and kept them in the loop again through shipping, since they had to build and live with whatever the redesign committed to.

The features

Designing the analysis tier

The expert-grade features were the hardest test of that finding: surface curvature maps, wall thickness analysis, and 2D and 3D section views. In most CAD packages these sit behind setup dialogs that assume you already know the answer you’re looking for. I inverted the order — a legible first result from sensible defaults, rendered directly on the model, parameters after:

The entry point tells the story. Where competitors bury full and half sections in separate tabs with paragraph-length instructions, Zixel offers one unified, icon-first entry — a quick contextual choice with no modal dialogs to decode.

Wall thickness and curvature follow the same grammar: analysis reads as color on geometry, not tables. Learn one feature and you have learned them all.

The same defaults-first logic reshaped the drawing template workflow — every attribute visible, a legible preview before anything is committed, and batch import for the templates engineers already own:

The system

The design system underneath

I built and maintained the design system used across the platform’s modules. In software this dense, consistency is not polish; it is how the product teaches itself. When panels, inputs, and states behave identically everywhere, each workflow an engineer learns lowers the cost of the next one.

Maintaining it was as much editorial work as visual work. I kept the component set small, documented when to use each pattern, and treated every one-off exception inside a module as a bug to resolve rather than a precedent to follow.

Results

What the benchmark measured

Instrumented usability benchmark sessions on the redesigned section workflow measured the clearest gains: task time down 57.6%, undo actions down 69.2%, and satisfaction up 105%. Those are the numbers this project set out to move, because they measure exactly what an engineer experiences when the tool stops explaining itself.

Method: instrumented usability benchmark on the redesigned section workflow. An earlier, separately measured round on onboarding — before this benchmark existed — showed onboarding time down 30% and task completion up 25%. The two studies cover different moments in the same redesign: the earlier one measured a new user’s first hour, the later one measured an expert mid-task.

The honest part

What I cut, and what didn’t move