Samenvatting

Slovak company cadvision s.r.o. is an exclusive reseller of products made by Hexagon, Bricsys, Honeywell, Simtronics, Fluidflow and M-Files on the Slovak and Czech market, and was established in the year 2012 based on years of experience in the fields of consulting, analysis, setup, implementation, technical support and specialized training for advanced users of CAD and ECM software. M-Files is an electronic document administration tool with focus on relationships between objects in object structures. This document focuses on the analysis and resolution of the M-Files software’s user interface problem. According to its users, in a process of viewing object to object relationships, it displays currently irrelevant content together with the content of interest. Further, the object relationships are depicted in a flat, table-based way where often long text serves as the only means of object type recognition. M-Files does use icons to represent the object types, but these are very small and cannot be resized. These factors often result in confusion and time loss when working with the object to object relationship chain. The aim of cadvision s.r.o. is to improve the workflow of their clients as well as their own when working with project, commercial and technical documentation. This thesis focuses on making use of 3D space as opposed to the flat, table-based object structures representation, which allows for better spatial distribution of objects within the structures, where the user would also have control over the currently displayed content thanks to filters. Furthermore, a richer use of intuitive imagery was made, to represent object types and reduce the need of text. Since the product development is being executed by a technician, student of a bachelor’s degree Creative Media & Game Technologies at Saxion University of Applied Sciences and not an artist, the priority is to provide essential M-Files functionality over visually appealing interface within the final product. The models and textures used in the final version of the product are expected to be only placeholders. However, it will be possible to customize the software without the need to adjust the product’s code. A group of experienced M-Files users will be asked to test and compare the M-Files Desktop Client with the product of this research, 3DView. Their rating and feedback will be collected and considered during the future iterations of development to ensure 3DView meets the users’ demand as precisely as possible. Apart from improving the workflow, cadvision s.r.o. will get to explore the powers of 3D graphics as well as the APIs of M-Files in more depth and this way broaden their knowledge base