I know the creating idea station post is contentious! We are using this to look for items that we can do without an enormous development effort. In particular, we are particularly looking at the top (30 or 40) ideas and see if they are within reach. Over the last years we have knocked off quite a few of the ones that were in the top. Over the last years we have taken the 'top voted' items that are doable from a development perspective, to user meetings and ask customers to vote on which are the more important ones from this list.
This does not mean that the the idea station is NOT without problems:
- There a are very many ideas in very many directions and doing a good assessment of them is impractical (and on its own would be a near full time job). I understand and accept there is an expectation gap. Customers raise topics but Autodesk (and probably in particular me) is not actively curating the list and participate in the discussions and changing statuses.
- If an idea is a good idea, it may still be a huge development it. It is inevitable that there are going to be more ideas than we can realistically implement.
- The number of ideas is also unmanageable for user. Requests appear multiple times as a result and... how does an issue that is low on the list even get visibility to vote. 100% ... this is a problem with the idea station. One way to approach it is for me to 'delete' items on the requested list. This would bring the list down to something more manageable but ... it also removes peoples ability to vote on the issue. There is not an easy solution, but frankly we may get to a point where we have to make a fresh start.
- Lastly, I can understand that there is a desire for a hard commitment 'we will do this' (in the upcoming release) as a status. I 100% can agree that this is an essential part of this type of idea station, but we cannot make forward looking promises.
To give a bit more insight @PascalGosset, I can assure you that in our last planning, we did discuss two of your ideas near the top of the list; the more realistic weldline display (not following element edges) and Void prediction. Nothing is impossible in software, but certain things are easier to do that others. We have to make choices; if we do one big development, is that more important than 5 smaller developments? The answer is always going to be imperfect.
On all top voted ideas we have done some level of technical assessment of what it would take, and where the big blockers are. For some of the big blockers, we need to wait for some other tech to come in first (eg. for the runner library). For others, the issues are very ... very non-trivial (e,g. overmolding cooling is too hard to setup).
Again,...the idea station is imperfect, but with the 2024 release we delivered the Min/Max result options (listed 2x in the top 30 or 40) and have contact conditions for touching cores in core-shift. We ARE working on others that have high votes.
I completely understand that the idea station can be seen as a waste of time, but we ARE looking at this as input an direction. We are not clearing items as fast as anyone of us would want, but we have to balance 'features' with things like improving accuracy and speed/performance projects, as well as mundane component updates.
Hanno van Raalte,
Product Manager - Injection Molding & Moldflow products
