Revit families are by nature pretty flexible. Even if you build a family to work with only a given range of sizes or in particular positions, a user can often find ways to use the family outside of those intended contexts. So sometimes it’s desirable to have a way of highlighting the fact that a family is outside of an acceptable range, or that it is positioned wrongly, e.g. a face-based family meant for walls that’s being placed on a ceiling. If you can’t stop a user from using a family “incorrectly” —and it may not be incorrect, just not recommended or optimal —then the next best thing is to provide some feedback to the user to indicate what is happening.
I recently saw one example of this at the BIM Show Live here in London, where Adam Ward – BIM and Technology Specialist at BIM.Technologies – showed in his presentation a truss family that would ‘glow’ red whenever its length extended past the size at which the manufacturer could build them. I consider this a good example of a warning, or if you want, instructions about the real-world product’s limitations or performance.
Another example would be the below toilet partitions by Bradley. A disclaimer first: I have created hundreds of families for Bradley and the toilet partitions in particular were all created by me. Each of these families has 3D text giving instructions on how to use the family. I have seen and been asked to do this type of built-in instructions in other situations as well. In this case, however, I feel this is the wrong approach for a number of reasons.
First, the text adds weight to the family, to the order of 300K to 600K in this case. While I generally agree with Steve Stafford that, as he so nicely put it, “file size is a red herring” and shouldn’t take priority when evaluating a family, it does certainly count for something, especially when added up across many families. If every manufacturer were to take the same approach that Bradley did for providing instructions to users, we’d have a systemic problem of bloated families that would have a noticeable impact for users.
The instructions text shown also has a visibility setting, and that is where the second problem lies. It’s turned on by default; everyone will see it and have to go and turn it off. The family, if I may say so, isn’t so hard to understand as to warrant constant instructions. Most users will figure it out just by looking at the instance parameters available when in a project. This is penalizing every user out there for the few that are so new to Revit as to need these instructions. Optionally, you can edit the family and delete the text if you don’t want it there. That’s just not user-friendly and definitely not something a new Revit user should be expected to do.
So how else could we go about providing instructions for these families? If the information were made available on the page where the family is downloaded, I believe that would cover almost everyone’s needs. If you still really wanted to have the instructions available from within the family, then you could put links within parameters that would take the user to specs and other bits of information that might be relevant to the family and its related product(s).
Having said this, the approach Bradley took is definitely better than no instructions at all, and I consider it a step in the right direction. They added their text with the best interests of users in mind, and a lot of users might find that the embedded text and visibility setting work perfectly fine for them.
My main concern in this post is to begin exploring the different ways that Revit families can incorporate feedback mechanisms that help guide users in using the families properly within a project. I think this is an important topic for improving the usability of Revit families, especially for manufacturer-specific content. I’ll be following up soon with another post illustrating a feedback mechanism I’ve been working on. In the meantime, I’d love to hear if anyone has other techniques they’ve used or opinions about feedback mechanisms they’ve found in other Revit families.
