Stop Starting From a Blank Canvas

For a long time, every new project in Giraffe started the exact same way: a blank map, and a blank slate. We built it that way on purpose. Flexibility felt like the safer bet, don't assume what someone's building, just give them everything and let them figure it out.

Spotting what needs fixing

We look at three things together:

• 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 Jakob Nielsen's classic ten heuristics, so we're fixing things that genuinely help, not just reacting to noise.

For this one, the clearest signal came from a simple question we already ask at signup: what are you building? Residential, industrial, and mixed-use came back as the three most common answers by a clear margin, which is exactly why those are the three templates we built first.

What we found in the data

An open-ended blank canvas sounds like the flexible choice. In practice, it just moves the same setup work onto every single person, every single project, and the numbers back that up from a few different angles.

• People tried to configure this by hand, and it often didn't go well. Close to half of everyone who opened the usage editor to set up a building type from scratch left without saving anything. A similar pattern showed up in the content library: most people who browsed it left without importing anything, roughly 7 in 10. A smaller group found their own workaround, cloning an existing usage and adapting it by hand, essentially building a makeshift template because a real one didn't exist.
• A lot of people never make it to actually drawing. Meaningfully fewer people ever get to editing and refining geometry than get to creating it in the first place. Usage configuration sits right at that drop-off point, the step between opening a project and doing real work on it.
• The support data mirrors this exactly. Well over 1,000 conversations in a single period were procedural questions, people asking how to set up an industrial usage, or what to use for a warehouse, the kind of question a curated starting point answers before it's even asked. None of this reflects the product being broken. It reflects people arriving with a specific project in mind and having to navigate a generic library to figure out what applied to them.

What we built

New workflow-specific templates, built for multifamily, industrial, and mixed-use projects, preloaded with the usages, flows, apps, and layouts that actually fit that kind of work. Even the lightning bolt flows reflect the template's content, so nothing in the toolkit feels generic. It's all tailor-made for the workflow you've selected. Choose the template that matches the deal in front of you, and skip straight past the setup that a blank canvas would have made you do from scratch.

What this means for you

Less time recreating the same setup you've built a dozen times before, more time on the parts of the deal that actually need your judgement. A multifamily template won't make you sift through warehouse uses. An industrial template won't bury you in dwelling types. It's a small change with a compounding effect: every new project starts closer to real work instead of further from it.

Part of a series on the reasoning behind Giraffe 6.0. See also our posts on the new home screen, configurable layouts, project creation, properties palette, content consolidation, the rebuilt drawing toolbar, and drawing quality of life improvements.