Mathwork's System Composer

Background

Customers are designing and managing complex multi-domain systems in multiple models. Those models interact with each other and so customers need tooling to design and simulate the entire system architecture.

Customer Pain

Customers face challenges with disparate tools that lack ease of use and depth of functionality. They need a seamless, intuitive interface that allows for efficient collaboration and system design.

Proposal

The proposed design features a fluid interaction model with simple, grey-scale visuals, making diagrams easy to create and read. System Composer integrates both Simulink’s native canvas and a next-gen web framework canvas, allowing for novel interaction testing and streamlined collaboration between front-end and back-end teams.

Prototype

With high level requirements that it must be as easy to draw as pen and paper I set out to design a fluid interaction model and simple grey-scale predominant visuals, the result is diagrams that are easy to use and read at scale.

I had significant work behind the scenes bridging the gap between the frontend System Composer team and 2 separate backend squads – the native Simulink canvas and next gen web framework canvas. System Composer utilises both stacks and I was responsible for overseeingnew requirements into Simulink while utilising the html canvas to design and test novel interaction paradigms

Validate

Testing mostly involved weekly calls with large scale customers such as Boeing and Airbus who provided a mix of direct feedback on the canvass and organizational workflows that highlighted the collaboration needs that the product should solve for.