Announcements
Visit Fusion 360 Feedback Hub, the great way to connect to our Product, UX, and Research teams. See you there!
cancel
Showing results for 
Show  only  | Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Curate the videos and blog posts - add some text, tables of contents, anything

Curate the videos and blog posts - add some text, tables of contents, anything

Fusion 360 has lots of neat stuff, but IMHO it's virtually impossible for a new user to figure it out.

 

It's pretty clear that Fusion 360 has abandoned traditional documentation, and the current strategy is to try to do everything with a combination of forum posts and Youtube videos.

 

The problem is that figuring out which posts and videos have the right information is extremely time-consuming.  My suggestion is that you spend some time organizing the posts and videos - put together some kind of guide that points people to the valuable ones, tells people what's in each video, that kind of thing.  ("Need to know about sketching?  Watch these five videos, and read these 4 forum posts."  That kind of thing.)

 

(FWIW, I think giving up on the doc was an unfortunate idea.  At least for me, the way you're trying to get new users up to speed is failing badly.)

9 Comments
herzinj
Alumni

Thanks for the feedback, banshee10.  I understand that the amount of content and locations to go for content can be a bit overwhelming at the moment.  We are actively working on making the training material better, as well as trying to organize the videos on YouTube in a more reasonable (easily searchable) fashion.  I'm thinking that everyone here making content feels that what they made is valuable, it is just difficult to place it all in a spot that is easy for everyone to follow along.  If you happen to find any particular posts, videos or documents that you find particularly helpful, please let me know so that they can be focal points for specific topics.  In the meantime, I think it would be a great idea for me (or someone else here) to put together a list of topics like sketching, sculpting, visualization and then what we feel are the best things to learn from.  I'll start looking into it.

 

James

herzinj
Alumni
Status changed to: オートデスク審査落選
 

Hey banshee10 - have you been to http://fusion360.autodesk.com/resources? You can also get there by clicking the "?" in upper right in Fusion. This is more video focused than traditional help, but we do provide more than just YouTube and forums. I'm interested in any feedback you might have about the help. Thanks.

 

Patrick

banshee10
Advocate

Hi herzinj -

 

"I'm thinking that everyone here making content feels that what they made is valuable, it is just difficult to place it all in a spot that is easy for everyone to follow along"

 

Yes - what's there is definitely useful.  But it's a giant reference book scattered in a lot of places, and it's in desperate need of:

 

- searchability - all the good videos need some text and timecodes ("18:27  - talk about how to project geometry onto a sketch", etc).  They can't be searched right now, and in 2014, that means they might as well not exist

- something like a table of contents and an index

 

"I think it would be a great idea for me (or someone else here) to put together a list of topics like sketching, sculpting, visualization and then what we feel are the best things to learn from."

 

You've got that place already - it's what you get when you hit the help button in the upper right hand corner (right now, .  I think that's the right place to make these changes.  There should be help search in that question-mark-dropdown, and it should search exactly what you're talking about.

 

banshee10
Advocate

Hi patrick.miller -

 

Yes, definitely, I've tried to spend a fair amount of time there.  It has some issues though.

 

- It doesn't talk what seem to be pretty basic concepts for the software.  Direct and parametric modelling?  I still find that concept utterly baffling (you invented a new name for typing a parameter into a field vs. just dragging it?  Srsly?  Huh?  DO NOT UNDERSTAND.), and it definintely comes up in training.  I'm not seeing it in the table of contents.

 

- Positioning things relative to each other is a big deal (it's like 90% of why I want to use the software), but it doesn't get much treatment.  I think this is all about sketch, and sketch in general seems to be absolutely core to 360, but it's almost ignored.

 

- Topics tell you how to do something, and the why is often utterly mysterious.  For example, there's a topic for how to turn off design history.  Lots of detail with screenshots.  There's a big problem here.  I can't think of a single tool I use (Eclipse, Xcode, Word,vi, emacs, you name it) that has a mechanism for turning off the undo history.  Not one.  (OK, you can probably do it in emacs...).  It's just crazy that the feature exists - but you clearly spent a lot of time telling me about it.  Tell me why I'd ever want to do this.

 

- Lots of stuff is missing.  For example, I wanted to find out what the various colors of dots and lines mean in sketch.  I couldn't find anything about that.  Or do a search for "construction line".  Or for ""project / include" - those are the literal text of menu items, and there's nothing in the help about them.  Or search for "base feature".

 

- Search isn't very good - it doesn't even tell me what kind of thing the result is (doc, forum post, whatever).

 

- It has a discussion/feedback feature, and I don't think I've ever seen any response to any posting there.  It's a ghost town.  Turn off the feature completely, or use it, but don't leave it sitting there unloved.

 

- There's no context help that I see - it'd be great to tie menu items to parts of http://fusion360.autodesk.com/resources directly.

 

banshee10
Advocate

And I should add that what's there on  http://fusion360.autodesk.com/resources is good - there just needs to be more of it.  Things like the joint section in particular were very helpful.

 

A minor tweak to consider - animated gifs for things like joints in addition to the video.  It'd be nice to be able to just see them at a glance instead of clicking play on a video.

 

And please get rid of Flash.  It's a dead technology.  I'd love to be able to look at some of this stuff just holding a tablet, and that doesn't work.

banshee10
Advocate

Here's another example where the doc doesn't exist:

 

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Help-and-Support/Fusion360-still-crashes-too-much-OS-X/td-p/5165325/p...

 

Notice the bit where Board ManagerPhil.E talks about how deleting sketches that are attached to multiple documents can cause problems.  Now also notice the lack of documentation anywhere about how deleting sketches can cause problems.  (Or point me to the doc - I'd love to be wrong!)

 

Also notice the part where he talks about things in yellow in the timeline are indicating problems.  Now put yourself in the shoes of a user who has _absolutely no idea_ that coloring things yellow indicates that they're a problem.  Now go search for yellow in the documentation.

brynlukae
Community Visitor

Besides a huge impact on the public, video store software will improve the quality of your website on search engines. A search engine in order to measure the quality of the content of your website. Website shows that the text and other media, such as video marketing on-site that promises to provide high quality information and help to improve the quality of time.

keqingsong
Community Manager
Status changed to: RUG-jp審査通過

Hey there, thanks for the discussion around this. We are continuing to improve our learning experience, and will be updating our learning site so that there is a better flow/sequence of topics to go through so that you can get a deeper understanding of the software. 

Can't find what you're looking for? Ask the community or share your knowledge.

Submit Idea  

Autodesk Design & Make Report