Navigating complexity

Ansys Discovery

Ansys (Synopsys) is the world’s largest engineering simulation company with over $2.5 billion in annual revenue.

Typical user: Mechanical engineers
Scenario: Run variation study to find the best design
Goal: Increase efficiency Reduce learning curve
My role: Product design
Team: PM Frontend Dev Backend Dev
Timeline: 2 months

What is Ansys Discovery?

3D design software that allows engineers to quickly explore and test ideas with real-time simulation early in the development process.

Challenge

Pop-out clutter for Variation Study

Variation Study helped design engineers find the best-performing design, but the experience was cluttered. Multiple pop-outs blocked the workspace, overlapped, and were hard to manage.

Initial research

Understanding logistics

Since I’m not from an engineering background, I started by trying to understand the logistics. With limited resources and time, I started with help docs and scheduled an interview with PM.

Help docs

PM meeting

Goals

Replace pop-outs with tabs

Iteration 1

Removed overlapping pop-outs

Some actions are better grouped together

Still limited by space, hard to manage 100+ variations

Deep research

Understanding user flow

To validate and truly understand the user flow, I did further research. This time, I was able to find the training recordings and conducted 2 informal interviews to get some deep insights about the flow.

Training recordings

ACE interview (Ansys Customer Excellence)

Proxy user