Solidworks Conceptual Designer

Launched in 2013, Conceptual Designer (now SolidWorks xDesign) was the first SolidWorks app to be delivered on the company’s new 3DExperience platform. This was a 100+ person effort to develop a better mechanical CAD application from scratch.

The goals included a clean, immersive UI that is adaptable to both traditional desktop and touch-enabled mobile devices. A key achievement was our interface for modeling features keeps the user’s focus centered on their content rather than in dialogs and menus at the edge of the screen.

As the first app to be delivered on a new platform, our team had to overcome some unique challenges. For example, many of the low-level UI components (sliders, color picker, etc.) had to be designed and developed in parallel with the platform. This presented a great opportunity to create a new design system from scratch, in partnership with colleagues at our parent company (Dassault Systèmes) in Paris.

Now being used for production work by a number of SolidWorks customers, this app has earned praise for its intuitiveness and time-saving UI.