After looking broadly at the different competitors, from paper instructions to digital tools, I want to now do a thorough UX audit of the different digital tools to get a better understanding of how they walk users through building furniture, and the over look and feel of these tools. I will be taking lots of screenshots and creating key user flow diagrams to see patterns and where there may be gaps. I will be recording my findings on this page also.
BILT was the first digital competitor that I came across in my research for this project. As I explained before, it is an interactive 3D app that allows digital manuals to be turned into 3D models using CAD. It walks users step-by-step through product assembly. It is primarily used for industrial machinery that have complex assembly.
Viflux is my favourite of the three digital competitors, as it is closest to what I will be looking at but also overall struck me at first as the most engaging and intuitive. It’s main selling point is allowing companies to send off manuals and Viflux will turn them into interactive 3D steps. It features an AI assistant and has a very clean, modern user interface that reminds a lot of Claude. It describes itself as an “Interactive AI copilots for physical products”, and focuses on three areas. This is instructions, spare parts, and training. The instructions area is most inline with what I will be looking at.
Easemble was the last digital competitor that I looked at. Although it had the basic functionalities the other two had, it is definitely the weakest of the three. I found on first exploration it was hard to find products and the step-by-step instructions were very basic, with no real place to go if the user needs help.