We've entirely rebuilt Quilter's web app to improve our job creation, submission, and review workflow.
At Quilter, we imagine our product as two distinct, interconnected hemispheres of a single brain – a "compiler" that accepts and completes circuit board design requests, and our "app" that handles configuration, submission, and candidate review for completed design jobs.
Over the last 9 months, Quilter has generated hundreds of thousands of unique circuit board designs for hundreds of users. Our closed beta users also helped us identify areas for improvement, the most important being the idea of Quilter's "reliability" – our ability to consistently set and deliver on our users' expectations for the job they submitted.
We want our product to be like your team's rockstar EE intern; while it can't handle every design task today, it should reliably deliver with the designs that it can create, and improve quickly with time.
To that end, we set an objective late last year to rebuild the Quilter app to better deliver on reliability in three important ways.
1/ Proactively resolve job configuration issues
Before, it was not uncommon to wait multiple hours for a job to complete before learning that a simple issue with your job setup rendered Quilter's designs unusable.
In the new app, we've significantly improved the clarity and rigor of our submission workflow to:
- Surface clearer and more actionable upload errors for input files
- Visually preview your board file before submission to better identify board or component-level parsing issues
- Check for common job configuration issues so they can be resolved prior to submission
(ex: "You've uploaded a fully routed board – there's nothing for us to do.")
2/ Set clearer expectations for your job
As an engineering tool built for expert users, one of our core objectives is to never over-promise and under-deliver. Our old app did very little to set expectations whatsoever, and unintentionally set some incorrect ones, too ("is 12 hours an estimate, or a timeout?").
The result was that we noticed many users asking the same basic questions:
- What types of boards can Quilter design well?
- How long does Quilter take to complete a job?
- What factors impact the quality of Quilter's design outputs?
In the new app, we've created a much more clearly defined "happy path" that provides tips and information along the way to ensure you get our best results for each job you submit.
The app will also do a better job of keeping you informed as its capabilities improve, so it's always clear over time which jobs you can trust Quilter to tackle.
3/ Provide better transparency into jobs and candidates
Finally, because Quilter jobs currently take tens of minutes to hours to produce its first successful candidate, we've invested significantly in improving clarity and transparency into the status of Quilter jobs and design candidates.
In the new app, you'll see significant changes to:
- Layout jobs summary
On the new job summary page, you'll get much more granular visibility into the status of each job you've submitted – its runtime, and the number of total and successful candidates that each job has produced. - Layout job details
Every job details includes a clear summary of its current status as well as all the input configurations that you set when you submitted the job, making it easy to tweak and re-run design jobs. - Candidate details
We've rebuild the candidate viewer to ensure that we're more effectively focusing your attention on the best candidates, and created new global candidate filters to help you quickly narrow your solution space with custom requirements.
What's next?
Our new app makes Quilter a more reliable resource for electrical engineers who want to rapidly design high quality circuit boards, and give our development team a solid foundation from which we will continue to improve and grow.
Have an idea for how we can improve our product from here? Stop by our community forums to view, submit, and vote on suggested improvements.
What should we build next?
