A User Study to Examine the Different Approaches in the Computer-Aided Design Process

Abstract

The computer-aided design process is in a complicated non-linear structure involving selections from a pool of configurations with optimized parameters. In order to understand and improve this decision-making process, this paper conducted a user study on students and expert professionals with more than three years of computer-aided design experience. The study revealed the common design problems and challenges faced by CAD designers. The findings also showed that the design approaches students and expert professionals used were different. Additionally, we found that computer-aided designers expect the system to be able to understand vast quantities of multivariate data, control high-quality products for low costs, manage the knowledge personalization and codification within the company, as well as prevent the design mistakes at the design stages. Our findings may lead to the future development of new approaches to improve the computer-aided design process and close up the gap between student and expert professionals in computer-aided design. This paper provides initial support for this future approach.