Coming Soon: Draw the Way You Actually Think

At the end of the day, real estate is just polygons on a map. A building is a shape. A driveway is a shape. A patch of grass is a shape.

But Giraffe didn't treat it that way; it sorted everything by type first. A driveway was infrastructure. A building was a use class. A patch of grass was its own category.

Classification is important for the data and calculations underneath, but it's a pretty confusing way to ask someone to start drawing.

Spotting what needs fixing

Here's how we know that typology-based drawing tools were actually getting in people's way.

• Usage patterns. Anonymised data on how people actually move through Giraffe, no personal info, just where people click, pause, or get stuck.
• Support conversations. Every chat with GiraffeBot, plus every direct conversation Holly and Adam have with customers.
• Direct feedback. Calls and check-ins with the people using Giraffe day to day.

We also weigh what we find against established usability principles, like Nielsen's heuristics, so we're fixing things that genuinely help, not just reacting to noise.

For this one, the pattern was hard to miss: people asking how to draw basic shapes, and usage data showing the same drawing mistakes happening over and over, right alongside each other.

What we found in the data

In this case, the pattern was hard to miss: people asking how to draw basic shapes, and usage data showing the same drawing mistakes happening over and over, right alongside each other.

• Letting you work the way you naturally think. People think in shapes, rectangles, circles, lines, not in Giraffe's internal categories. More than one person asked outright how to draw a basic rectangle. Simple as that sounds, the old toolbar didn't make a plain shape like that the obvious first step.
• Making it quick to draw the same thing again. We've heard this show up as wanting to draw several of the same thing in a row without resetting everything each time. People were working around it with things like the eyedropper tool, or drawing a throwaway shape off to the side just to copy its settings.
• Not making you memorise a whole system just to start. The old toolbar made you recall which category something fell under before you could even draw it. Is a driveway a road? A landscape feature? A building part? That's a lot of thinking before you've drawn a single line.
• Keeping your most-used tools close by. Nearly three out of four people opened the properties panel within five minutes of drawing something. Over 90 days, that added up to more than 70,000 edits. Properties aren't an afterthought, they're part of the same act of creating.
• Avoiding easy mistakes. People kept making the same two errors, wrong layer, wrong use type, then correcting them right after. One person put it well: "How am I supposed to know what kind of layer it is? I drew a 3D boardwalk and that's under the Infrastructure dropdown." We also saw people deleting drawing layers about as often as they made them, a pretty good sign folks weren't always sure what a layer was for until well after they'd made it.

What we built

The rebuilt drawing toolbar leads with plain shapes, polygon, line, point, instead of selecting from a categorized tool first.

With the pet palette, you don't need to already know how Giraffe classifies a use to start drawing. You can pick from a list instead of having to remember whether something counts as a building, a landscape feature, or a road. Search the same usage list no matter what type of thing you're creating, instead of a different setup for every category.

What this means for you

You'll sketch faster, because you're not stuck figuring out Giraffe's categories before you've even drawn the shape in your head. Less wrestling with the tool, more time actually exploring the design options that matter.

This is one part of a broader look at what's changing in Giraffe 6.0. Curious about the thinking behind the changes? We put together a bigger-picture look at why we're making these changes across the whole product.

Read the full story →