The Personas of Cloud CAD Collaboration: A Case Study of a Team of CAD Professionals

Computer-aided design (CAD) has become a fundamental tool in engineering projects, particularly in product design and development. Recent advancements have shifted CAD systems to the cloud, referred to by us and others as cloud CAD, offering a new realm for collaboration in product development projects. The transition to cloud CAD introduces substantial changes to how one might manage product design teams, impacting how design tasks are divided among team members, the choices designers make in undertaking different tasks, and the additional responsibilities team members must fulfill. In this article, we investigate the “personas,” described as patterns of activity representing an engineer's roles and responsibilities, that are essential to successful collaboration in cloud CAD. To achieve this, we conducted a mixed-method case study of a self-organized, time-bounded, and geographically distributed team of CAD professionals. This unique setting allowed us to identify and understand the personas that engineers adopt during cloud CAD projects, where the engineers are not constrained to predefined roles and responsibilities. By analyzing CAD user action logs, the final CAD model, and semistructured interview transcripts, we identified three integral personas in cloud CAD projects: the guide, the integrator, and the communicator. We further observed that the emergence of each persona is temporally dependent, varying at different stages of the design process. Our work contributes an in-depth analysis of three personas in cloud CAD, their relevance and benefits to CAD projects, and practical implications for engineering managers to support effective cloud CAD collaboration.