Brandy Ryan
New Alias & VRED UX (user experience)
Autodesk is excited to announce its new user experience for Alias and VRED, launching in our 2024 release. This is a solution-wide update to the ways users experience our products, how they learn to use our products, and a major update to the technical foundation of our User Interface. Under the hood, the User Interface components have been completely updated to Qt QML and Qt Style Sheets.
Here are some highlights of what’s ahead for you in your Alias and VRED experience.
Balanced for new and experienced users
This new user experience aims to be more accessible for new users, while maintaining familiarity and function for long-time users.
The modern experience is balanced between acknowledging Alias’s strong history and work efficiency, pragmatic execution, standardizing on a common design language between our products, and implementation of Qt and Qt components.
These changes make our products easier to use and learn. They still feel and act as they always have, so we don’t interfere with muscle memory of existing users. We know that maintaining a consistent user interaction is critical for experienced Alias users.
Seamless and connected software solution
Our process involved engaging users and customers closely at every step along the journey to bring these new user experiences to life. The positive encouragement we received made us extend the user enhancements from Alias to VRED and ShotGrid – offering a seamless and connected solution throughout the agile Design Studio.
Alias and VRED now share a common design language that extends to other Autodesk products so that moving between the tools is more fluid, will feel easier and more natural for our users.
Collaborate between products
The improved consistency in user experience between Alias, VRED, and ShotGrid enables design studio team members to move more easily between products. And the connection with ShotGrid enables collaboration and data and process management for the design studio.
Accessible and available in Learning Editions
We are making Alias and VRED more accessible for everyone. The same user experience will be available in our Alias and VRED Learning Editions, which anyone can access for free, for non-commercial use.
https://www.autodesk.com/campaigns/alias-learning-edition
https://www.autodesk.com/campaigns/vred-learning-edition
The new user experience in Alias and VRED improves the learnability of our apps – providing a refresh of the UI for existing users and making more approachable and accessible for new users.
Extensible framework for the future
These new UI frameworks are also more extensible and build a foundation for the future.
While current VRED 2024 updates have mainly focused on UI and common UX elements like onboarding, color themes and learnability, the next phase will address deeper, long standing UX-related wishes from our customers and improvements like better searchable preference, a hotkey editor and more.
Customer & user reception
The release of Alias 2024 and VRED 2024 represent a tremendous collaboration between our product teams and our customers who provided input and feedback throughout the development process. Feedback from customers throughout the development process has been very positive.
The reception from customers at this year’s Automotive Innovation Forum in Frankfurt was enthusiastic. Our keynote presentation and hands-on demonstrations were well received, and we look forward to hearing from you as you adopt these new experiences.
Yes, there will be more on these 2024 releases in the coming weeks!
Stay tuned. You can check us out on LinkedIn, subscribe to our Alias and VRED YouTube channels, and follow us on Facebook.