Encoding thirty years of patternmaking habit into a CAD tool
Research that set the interaction model for 2Design
Context
Morgan Tecnica builds cutting tables for the fashion industry, and set out to make the 2D CAD software that sits upstream of them — 2Design, for pattern makers and designers. The users were not novices. They were people who had done the same job for decades, in software they had learned to fight.
Constraint
A pattern maker’s expertise lives in muscle memory and in conventions that were never written down. Ask what they need and you get the current tool’s feature list back. The requirement had to be observed, not collected.
This is the same problem as an AI deployment, with a different surface: the workflow that matters is the one nobody documented.
What I built
Field research with pattern makers and designers across the stakeholder chain — not only the operators, but the people upstream and downstream who inherit their output. Contextual interviews at the workstation rather than in a meeting room, then usability testing against the interaction model before it was committed to code.
The study ran five months of interviews across the Italian fashion industry, collecting the frustrations and the bottlenecks of the software in use. What came out of it reversed the ownership’s original plan: a different subscription model was chosen, one that fit how these users actually work.
What happened
The software was already in development. The research fed back into it, reordered the priorities of several features, and redirected development effort to where it earned more.