In the original version of the SID Control, we included access to view the Steps that would define a simulation within the Discovery product. While the work to introduce the simulation steps concept into the workflow was viewed as important, the senior leadership didn’t view it high on the priority list, and not a feature that was necessary for the first commercial release of the software. This decision did create an opportunity for us to repurpose the upper right hexagon of the SID for a different purpose.

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As the Discovery product continued to evolve (before the first release), and important user need that came into focus was to introduce the ability to create parameters within a simulation problem, and to use those parameters to generate variations. As an example, a parameter could represent the length of a bolt, where multiple variations would be generated by the user to explore different values length of the bolt (e.g. Variation 1 uses a bolt length of 7 mm, Variation 2 uses a bolt length of 7.25 mm, Variation 3 uses a bolt length of 7.5 mm, etc.). The benefit to the user is that they can explore differences in the design of their model or simulation problem, without the need to create duplicate simulations within the product. The user can solve all of the variations at once, or just a subset of them.

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Discussions with the stakeholders allowed us to determine that adding variations to the product for the first commercial release was an absolute necessity due to the expectations of users had with our existing products. We explored the workflow of creating parameters and variations, and determining where to access variations from in the UI. The SID was one place we thought would be appropriate, particularly once we determined that simulation steps were not a feature that was needed for the first release, which opened up a place in the SID to incorporate variations (the top-right hexagon).

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The designer on my team and I knew the desired format for the collection of variations would be a table/datagrid. We put together a low-fidelity wireframe outlining the layout and interactions that we would like to see from this control, and shared it with the appropriate stakeholders to sign off on the planned design. We next worked with a developer to create a new table control building off a base table/datagrid control. Once the developer had an initial implementation, (which can be seen below) we worked with him to modify some of the basic interactions of the table (hover, select, etc), and to add additional visual elements to represent appropriate state (e.g. identifying the “current” variation, whose values for the parameter/parameters are reflected on the 3D model the user sees). We also accounted for other visual aesthetics including attributes like the alignment, background color, and table line color. This led us to the implementation below.