I’m not sure of the value of anything that I can add to the conversation. Really this is a discussion that needs to happen between the SketchUp userbase, and those in Trimble who can influence the future of the application.
Happy to tell a random story with no real direction or purpose though.
My Background
I was managing the SketchUp desktop apps for a couple of years until late 2019. Prior to joining SketchUp I established Trimble’s UI/UX strategy and UX design community across the wider company, and spent much of my career defining core parts of the Trimble ecosystem enabling humans from multiple industries using multiple tools to be able to collaborate… What does that mean? I love to make things work together, across teams, across divisions, across products, between professions.
Within SketchUp from about 2017 this meant using my UX skills to connect to the customers more deeply, and to bring the architecture applications closer together to enable cross app workflows. We interviewed a number of customers in in-depth interviews, to understand nuanced workflows, needs, and identify areas where we could have the highest levels of impact on those professional workflows.
During this time we also changed a lot about how the team operated, and how we delivered software. You will see now that the product is released a lot more often, and behind the scenes this also meant earlier engagement with customers via alpha access to new features.
There was no SketchUp or LayOut team. Everything we did was for both.
LayOut Performance
Let’s be honest, LayOut is cool, it’s important, it does things different than other apps in the same space, it completes SketchUp like a chairlift completes a ski resort.
Let’s also be honest, it’s not a secret that there are performance challenges, it’s a common piece of feedback from the public, and is feedback that should continue to be provided if it’s important to you.
If SketchUp performance is hard to solve, LayOut’s is a bit harder. Every page in LayOut represents multiple SketchUp model views. Think about that for a second, If SketchUp is rendering a viewport, it’s a single viewport. If it’s in LayOut it’s going through a number of extra complexities to make it 2D, allow for things to remain selectable, measurable, interactive etc… it’s non-trivial.
Some of this is raw technical performance, the low level complex number crunching math that holds the universe together. The stuff that you can’t always just keep tweaking (and rebuilding is a long process). I have no insights into any of this kind of work except to know the people in the team and how passionate they are about methodically doing some of this hard nuanced work.
Efficiencies alongside Performance
Part of my research and strategy around improving both SketchUp and LayOut was to look at hrs of effort spent by professionals to get to an outcome.
If using the interface is frustrating due to come performance challenges, how else can we support speed to outcome, alongside some of those other frustrations in an end to end workflow.
Linestyles, Tags, Tag groups (folders), Style overrides… These were all LayOut features. Many of them show up in SketchUp and are useful for SketchUp users, but they are all layout features, designed for LayOut users, to solve LayOut problems, and improve the speed of getting to LayOut outcomes. We calculated how many hours a year these workflows can save users, and it was significant.
Oh wait… SketchUp and LayOut users are the same people. So really they were features for users, and not for either SketchUp or LayOut. They were all features that celebrated the combination of SketchUp and LayOut together, making the sum of the parts better than the individual.
Sometimes we did things just in one app. Like drag and drop file import into SketchUp (How annoying was that before having it)
The team
SketchUp’s leadership changed since my departure. They are passionate about LayOut. In fact I can’t think of anyone more passionate about LayOut.
Trimble’s leadership also changed since I left, the former CEO was great for the company and grew it to what it is today via acquisition, bringing all the pieces under one roof. The current CEO has a different background, and I truly believe is the person to now pull those pieces together and strengthen each of them.
Summary
- Keep providing your feedback directly to Trimble
- Keep fulfilling your contracts as users and stay vocal, you are the customer, they are the service provider
Stay optimistic, regardless of everything else. They are all real people at the other end, and they care. Trimble is very diverse, and non-heirarchical. It’s not a top down organisation. So there is no evil person at the top saying yes, or no to anything. Therefore the people you want to talk to and influence are those that are working closer to the product, the middle levels, they are autonomous and enabled. There is no evil corporation. Trimble is a collection of companies that have been bought together around a series of interconnected problems.
Doug