It’s been more then a month now since our preview release, and we’ve been busy! We received lots of great feedback and we’re hard at work improving Arcol. In this post we’ll talk about how preview release went overall, what we learned, and what our plan is for the future.
How it went
Overall the preview release went great. A lot of you tried Arcol, and we didn’t observe any widespread crashes or catastrophic issues (phew!). We work hard to make Arcol stable during the weeks leading up to the release, and it seems to have done the trick.
Our main focused was to gather feedback, which we received feedback from through three channels.
- - In-app thumbs up/thumbs down button with text input
- - In-app Intercom chat
- - Follow-up email survey
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As we expected, there was a pretty massive range of feedback that came through all three channels we had set up. Some of you loved what you saw, some of you thought it was crap, and others thought it was just meh…all feedback was useful!
What we learned
Opening up your app to the entire world for the first time is, to put it mildly, stressful. We created a tutorial and support docs to try to make onboarding as smooth as possible, but this preview release exposed some gaps. Here are a few of the main ones we’ve been working to fix.
- Our tutorial needs to be better — We’re revamping the tutorial entirely and incorporating some specific feedback we got like the ability to resize and move the tutorial modal.
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- It wasn’t completely clear what Arcol is for — We’ve talked about Arcol being a conceptual design tool in blosts posts and on our website, but when some people saw that we have walls, windows, and doors they began trying to use Arcol as a complete BIM tool. Our new tutorial will take you through a typical workflow we’d expect you to complete in Arcol. Mike created an Arcol in 8 video to show this off.
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- People had difficulty finding the contextual menu — Existing tools like Rhino, Sketchup, or Revit show every button all the time. This is part of what makes them overwhelming for new users. In Arcol, buttons appear only when they can be used — the loft and sweep buttons appear when you select two sketches, whereas a boolean buttons appears when you select 2 extrusions. This cuts the clutter out of Arcol, which is great, but not many people discovered that. We’re working on making this feature more discoverable in our UI.
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- It wasn’t clear how to reset a view — Every view is 3D in Arcol, so you can orbit out of a floorplan view or elevation and then snap back to the original view. People had difficulty figuring out how to reset the view and accidentally orbited in top and side views. We’ve made the reset/save view buttons much more obvious and we’re adding the ability to lock views for when you want to prevent orbiting.
- Snapping and general modelling isn’t quite there yet — We knew this one going into the preview release, but we got some good specific feedback on it.
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What we have already done (and are doing)*
At Arcol, we highly value moving quickly while balancing “caring about our work”. Given that, we have been hard at work implementing the above feedback and shipping product to our beta users.
- Metrics — We recently shipped new metrics features. Users can now split their models into floors and can see real-time area calculations, parking requirements, and costing from your model. This feature combined with our site context import makes for an intuitive and powerful pre-design workflow.
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- DWG import* — We know that many projectst contractually require a provided DWG file to be used for the site boundary. In the next few days users will be able to import their own DWG file to act as the site boundary.
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- Revit export — Getting your concept work into Revit is vital. Otherwise, what’s the point? We have shipped our Revit plugin, allowing users to pull Arcol geometry into Revit as massing models.
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- Materials — Folks really wanted the ability to paint materials on their models. As always, we’ve gone a step beyond that. We have built high-quality PBR materials into Arcol.
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- Shadows — Now you can visualise the shadows for a specific date/time for your project after you’ve set site context.
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- Modelling Improvements — You can now create parametric arrays in Arcol (linear, rectangle, along a path etc). We have also fixed countless modelling bugs and stability issues.
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- Construction Planes — At the time of preview release you were restricted to drawing on the level plane or the faces of extrusions. We got lots of feedback about adding construction planes to make modelling more robust. Now every view in Arcol has a corresponding construction plane default (so you can draw directly on elevation views). You can use the view default, select a different default, or manually select a face that you’d like to orient the construction plane to.
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- Image Generation on Boards — We’ve noticed a lot of users who are starting to bring in AI image generation workflows like DALL-E or Midjourney into their conceptual workflow. To help in that, we added a handy “Generate Image” button on boards. Now you can generate concept images directly on a board…. for free!
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Check out our new walkthrough video by Mike.
If it looks valuable and you’d like to start trying out Arcol at your firm — email us at beta@arcol.io. That’s all for now, back to building! 🏗