Suggestions on improving experience for new users

benoitY6VC4 — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 19:03:44 GMT

I'm not sure if you take suggestions from users or if it's the right place to do so but I've been teaching Fusion360 for now 3 years and I observe continuously the same problems and pitfall for new users:

1) The installation: I understand why you advertise the paid version of the software, but you need to have a proper working way for peoples who have mistakenly installed the trial to switch to the personal version. Or better so to find a way to funnel them directly to the right version.

2) Colors inside the sketch: It's a recurring problem for a lot of users, not being able to see the difference between the light blue and the slightly more blue..er line when selected.

Same for the black of all constrained part compared to the black of dimensions lines.
Being able to change colors to more different ones would be awesome and would greatly help comprehension.

3)Default navigation: the first thing I do for all beginners is to switch navigation from fusion360 to thinkercad, It's obviously way easier for newcommers to understand how to navigate this way, having it by default would be a huge improvement.

4) projection Tool: I never understood why the projection tool was berried into a small tab, It's very usefull and a lot of people miss it because they cant find it

5) 3D sketch: I truly don't know why but a lot of beginners click on 3D sketch when they are lost inside the sketch, I have no suggestion for this it's more of a "fun" mystery

6)Way to see missing constraints: The biggest problems that every one have when starting to use any CAD software is understanding why their sketch is not fully constrained, that would be nice to have a way to have a function to see missing constraint or still existing movement of liberty like in Inventor for example.

7) Better indication that you are inside a sketch: A lot of student usually don't know if they are inside a sketch or not and they get pretty confused, That would be nice to have a coloured frame or background or just text to show them they are inside the sketch environnement because the currents buttons are too easy to miss.

😎 A beginner mode: There is way too much tool for a beginner in fusion360 and that is pretty overwhelming for new users , I usually have to unpin most of the available tools and then pin gradually the tool we use during the training.
Maybe having a prompt asking for the user level and give him the right tool from the beginning would be better while explaining to him how he can pin more to the toolbar.
Also some tools cannot be unpinned even if they are not useful to the student, all the assembly tools are pretty useless for beginner, but we have to always keep one witch is cluttering for no reason.

I'd like to finish by saying that despite theses suggestions, overall that is still one of the most user and beginner friendly CAD software I know and I truly love Fusion360 team for making CAD available to everyone.

topic Suggestions on improving experience for new users in Fusion Design, Validate & Document Forum

Suggestions on improving experience for new users