Hi all,
I’ve been discussing this in another thread, but wanted to reply here as well for visibility:
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-design-validate-document/january-update-intent-driven-design/t...
Fusion has an incredibly broad user base, from occasional hobbyists opening Fusion a few times a month, to companies with large teams collaborating on 10,000+ part assemblies. Creating an experience that works well across that entire spectrum is no small feat.
As a generalisation, guided external workflows (parts and assemblies) are essential for anyone working in teams or building larger assemblies. Historically, Fusion has supported these workflows, but they were not elevated as first-class experiences. This often meant working around defaults or fighting the system to stay aligned with best practices.
With that context, I want to address the request for a permanent “Don’t show this again” option on the What do you want to design? prompt.
This has come up during our user testing over the last few months, and it has been seriously considered. I / My Team ultimately decided against it, not because we want users to be forced into an extra click, but because removing the prompt would work against our longer-term direction.
I can’t share too much about future plans yet, as they’re not committed to a public roadmap, but the vision is for this prompt to become more than the six tiles you currently see. From that perspective, a permanent dismissal would likely be a short-term fix that creates more confusion than it solves.
We fully understand that many users are perfectly happy working in Hybrid and may never feel the need to change. It’s a flexible, powerful, and often delightful environment. For those users, the downside today is either one additional click when creating a new document, or a mental model shift (for example, using Ctrl+N, which bypasses the prompt entirely).
For users who want to build assemblies in a distributed, collaborative way, however, this update makes that workflow dramatically easier and more accessible.
As with all experiences in Fusion, this will continue to be evaluated. Based on our current development plans, keeping this prompt is the right decision. If we later determine that offering a preference to suppress it improves the overall experience, we absolutely can, technically it’s trivial. The challenge is more experiential (for example, how users then discover other document types like electronics or drawings), but it’s all solvable.
A couple of direct responses to comments in this thread:
@Zoltan3D — “90% of the time I don’t need a new part, I need to open projects.”
There’s a preference called Show Home tab at startup which I’d recommend enabling. That flow is intentionally more focused on opening existing work rather than creating new documents.
@fr4gged — “Why would anyone choose anything other than Hybrid?”
This often comes down to the long-standing confusion between bodies vs. components, and the need for the well-known “rule number one.” If you know how to use Hybrid well, are working solo, and your assemblies are within a certain size, it can be an extremely efficient way to model.
That said, in collaborative or large-assembly scenarios, Hybrid makes it much easier for mistakes to occur — such as bodies being created at the root level when they should be components. The guided workflows reduce that risk significantly.
Thanks for all the thoughtful feedback, it’s appreciated, and important as we continue to evolve these experiences. We have been testing this for a while on the insider forum, I'd encourage anyone to sign up to the insider program if you want to be involved in beta testing in the future.
Richard Stubley
Product Manager - Fusion Mechanical Design
