Sometimes (ok, usually), a piece of software is not perfectly designed for every possible use case. If the software user is looking for a capability that the software doesn’t have, she has to either find a workaround to the problems that she encounters or sit and stew that that software doesn’t have the feature that she needs (and maybe complain about it on Twitter).
To improve your experience using Inventor, Autodesk has implemented Inventor Ideas, an Autodesk Community forum. Inventor Ideas is an online public forum used specifically to address customer-submitted improvements for Autodesk Inventor. It’s generally used to discuss feature improvements to improve the user experience and to avoid having to use workarounds to get the product to work the way that you need.
While Inventor Ideas is sometimes used for implementing cool new features, it’s largely used to target areas of frustration that many users have. Having new features is great, but it means nothing if you’re not able to do simple tasks without having to use a workaround. That’s why we love Inventor Ideas – we get to hear what you want out of our software. This helps us build the best version of our software for you.
On Inventor Ideas, you tell the developers what to build next. You can post your idea, improvement or software feature to the forum. Once the idea is online, other users go to the forum to upvote the idea or add their suggestions – it’s a place to have discussions and fine-tune exactly the problem that’s happening and tell us what features to introduce to improve the software. You can access the currently top-voted (or “most kudoed”) suggestions here.
Before an idea can be implemented in the software, it first goes through development stages within the forum. As soon as it’s submitted, it’s in the Gathering Support stage, and users give that idea upvotes and comments in order to give that idea more traction. Once it’s gathered support, it hits the Under Review stage, which is when the development team reviews it, and moves it to either Comments Requested to gather more information about the issue and add more context, or pushes it to the Accepted phase. Once the feature has been developed and added to the software, it’s pushed to the Implemented phase.
There are also other statuses that don’t align linearly with the timeline. Sometimes, an idea is set aside for Future Consideration if the product development team is unable to move forward with the idea now but wants to possibly add it to the roadmap of the future product. Some feature submissions already exist in the software, and this status is Solution Provided with an explanation of how to access this feature. (There’s also a Duplicate status, which, obviously, if the idea is a duplicate of another one on the site. But there’s a great search feature to see if your idea has already been suggested by someone else!)
At Autodesk, what we’re looking for is to have you tell us what your problems are so that we can implement solutions. With Inventor Ideas, you have the ability to influence the next version of Inventor. You need to be using Inventor Ideas! Get your voice heard! More than 100 of your suggestions have already been implemented in the software. See what ideas have been implemented here.
