Custom IC Design Blogs

We live in a world where the idea of usability is to make products easy to use, make things easily accessible, and visually appealing. It's our constant endeavor to improve the usability of our products. Watch out this space for our posts every month on usability enhancements in Virtuoso® Layout Suite.

Until now, in this blog series, we have talked about many usability enhancements that have been done across Cadence® products to enhance user experience and productivity. Today, we share our story about how teams across Cadence diligently work towards enhancing your experience by continuously improving the quality of user interfaces from a usability aspect. Let's talk about the evolution of user interfaces across Cadence products.

Our Design Thinking Approach

Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation. It is a path to creative problem-solving. And, it is all about putting human needs at the center of all we do. 

In this blog, we share with you how we, at Cadence, use the design thinking principles for improving user interfaces or usability of our software products. The aim is to get to the table more meaningful, functional, and usable interfaces.

As a usability review team, our trigger is to review any new user interfaces being developed or any existing interfaces on which we have received design feedback from our customers. The usability review team has onboard usability analysts, who in addition to being trained in the field of usability, have extensive knowledge about Cadence products. 

We start with empathizing with the users, essentially collating feedback from our customers and the customer-facing teams. After feedback analysis, we start to define the problem. While defining the problem, we perform usability analysis or UI review of the GUI in question. The next step is to ideate solutions. This involves brainstorming of different ideas brought to the table by the team.

Once we have a few ideas, we start to prototype the interfaces. This step involves creating wireframes and constantly devising ways to enhance the prototypes. We then move on to test the interfaces. This task involves showcasing the proposed solution to the customer-facing teams, and fixing and revising our solutions. All this is an iterative process and involves members from many cross-functional teams. As a team, we surely strive towards delivering the best user experience to you.

The top five usability enhancement suggestions that the usability review team has shared with product teams are:

• Mapping of screen flow to user task flow
• Content rechunking to reflect the flow changes
• Meaningful labels for onscreen UI elements
• Enhanced presentation, layout, and navigation in a UI
• Regrouping and designing the tabs to reflect various settings of the fields

Evolution of Some User Interfaces

Having talked about the methodology we follow to enhance our user interfaces, let's now look at a few GUIs that we have enhanced in our products.

• Virtuoso Power Manager Setup Form: The layout of the form has been improved to utilize maximum real estate and reduce the visual load. The vertical tab arrangement in the old interface underutilized the real estate of the form. However, the new horizontal tab arrangement has added to the space available for placing the other controls in the form.

• EMIR Analysis Setup Form: The tabs in this form have been regrouped and renamed to display options that are independent of each other for performing a task. A drop-down list has replaced the three radio buttons for better utilization of the screen space. We also introduced a table to present the data in an organized manner in the limited real estate available in the form.

• Reliability Options Form: The tabs in this form have been regrouped logically to ensure that the commonly used options are placed on the first tab and the less frequently used options are placed on the subsequent tabs. The options which were almost lying loose initially, have now been folded under the progressive disclosures on each tab. This has reduced the visual and intellectual load by showing only a set of options at a given time.

These are just a few examples of the usability enhancements done in Cadence products. We are working meticulously towards enhancing user interfaces across our products. 

Happy reading, and stay safe!

Deepti Mishra Gupta and Komal Johar

Related Resources

User Guide 

• Virtuoso Power Manager User Guide
• Virtuoso ADE Explorer User Guide
• Virtuoso ADE Assembler User Guide

For more information on Cadence circuit design products and services, visit www.cadence.com.

Contact Us

For any questions, general feedback, or even if you want to suggest a future blog topic, write to custom_ic_blogs@cadence.com.

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