For our first To3D blog post, I thought it would be appropriate to share some results from our March survey on Design and 3D! We received a great deal of helpful and insightful feedback. It seems like sharing the results of the survey is a good place to start our blog.
The chart below provides some information on the level of participation. A high percentage of the people that opened the survey took the time to work through it. Even the people that did not finish provided a number of well thought out and insightful comments. We have not gotten data yet on how many people opened the email that introduced the survey, so we are missing some information to provide a complete snapshot.
In the survey we covered topics on CAD, PDM, Collaboration and Accessibility where each topic included an optional write-in area where we asked participants for opinions or feedback based on personal experiences. We also asked if people would like to be kept up to date with our progress or contacted by us for further dialogue. Since the survey was quite wordy and coming from an unknown company, I did not expect much participation, especially where extra work was required. You can see in the chart below, we got a surprisingly high number of optional comments and people that would like to be kept aware of our progress.
Note: the numbers do not reflect comments from people that did not finish the survey.
PDM was the most commented topic, by far. To be fair, some people liked their PDM software, but overall the feedback is that it’s still too much of a hassle to use. We did not ask people what CAD systems they used, but it was apparent from the comments that the leading CAD systems were well represented.
A little feedback on who took the survey: The breakdown on job descriptions and industry segments can be seen in the two charts below. Having worked on surveys in the field of mechanical design previously, I think the survey was well represented by both job description and industry segments.
Over the next several blog posts, I’ll get deeper into the software we are developing.