Rework Graphic User Interface

I would like to respectfully disagree with Robert Dickinson on some points and add a small selection of qualifying remarks:

• The graphing tools in ICM are all barely fit for purpose. Not simply unintuitive but genuinely irritating to use. Consultants often build their own graphing tools at their own expense. They may be customisable but the amount of menu diving required to customise (say) an observed-predicted report is significant, plus these things take absolutely ages to load compared to other industry graphing tools.

• Lots of features are hidden in drop down circa Windows 98 - these could be grouped into common themes and then aggregated into collapsible panels that the user could switch on and off (much like GIS tools). Where we do use drop downs the content of them needs to be updated to match how people presently use the tool rather than being a hangover from CS.

• We need user customisable (and saveable) layouts or skins for the main window to facilitate different workflows. Currently we just have everything everywhere all of the time. If this already exists - how is it done?

• The floating icons at the top - I see that they are there to offer ultimately customisability but its not always meeting the mark as they tend to dance around sometimes reappearing in different places when the app is reloaded or reorganising themselves when the window is moved/resized and then not going back to where they originally were when the window is maximised, quite annoying. Furthermore they are grouped into toolbars seemingly at random, for example: the quick graphing tool, thematic window launcher and job control window launcher are in one bar together which to my mind is totally incongruous. It would be better to have these grouped like the tools in QGIS with a menu to the right containing categorised tools described by name, the user could then have the option to "pin" any given tool as an Icon to a quick-access bar, this bar could be customised, positioned, saved and reloaded in a similar way to how thematics can be saved and reloaded.

• Some icons don't make sense at all, for example the icon you click to see the various model tables and the RTC editor. THAT is already a drop down menu (and couldn't be anything else) so why not have it up the top with the other drop down menus? perhaps put it next to the Data Export Centre as that tool exports data from said tables.

• It is a bit weird in 2025 to still right click on the Geoplan and select "properties and themes" to bring up the menu for modifying the visuals of the model itself. No other apps based on a GIS platform work like this apart from truly ancient versions of ARC. Again, this could be on a side panel ideally with a means to be able to click other things on the GUI rather than freezing the rest of the app while the themes are changed. That way we wouldn't have to constantly go in and reload menus just to make iterative tiny tweaks to get a given thematic just right. In an even better world, a similar panel could take over for the GIS-layer thematics and it would be better still to be able to switch back and forth between these to modify the overall visual appearance of all elements at the same time. The current workflow expects the user to go in, get the thematic right first time, come out, save the thematic, load it then carry on. Granted the thematics are quite powerful though - although it would be useful to see if the way users interact with these tools could be improved to suit a workflow that allows for rapid tweaking on the fly rather than menu diving.

• Some of the things which appear as icons are repeated in the drop-down menus which seems redundant (e.g. the Geoplan search features).

• Technically ICM does indeed have a lot of options for customisation but it is nearly impossible to work most of them out without several consultations of the help file. This is inevitable at this point as there are indeed a great many features and parameters that could be displayed, I appreciate the scale of ICM.

I do accept that ICM is a bit of a swiss army knife of a tool and that it is probably stacked with legacy code that is hard to change without changing everything connected to it. Do not think me unsympathetic. Although I maintain that the development of features and consideration of how the end users interact with these features has fallen out of step. CS was also very very clunky and wasn't ever a great foundation (GUI wise) to build the rest of the house. ICM is in fairness an improvement in many ways.

My central thesis here is not to pick nits on particular features (although I could) I would personally like ICM to launch with several available "skins" that suit particular workflows with the relevant tools and features pre-loaded and others hidden (not unavailable, just not given the same visual priority). For example I rely on a different set of features to do a model build compared to what I need for a model review, verification or data analysis. In some ways it would actually help people become more efficient to reduce the number of preloaded choices (another example, right clicking on model group and selecting "New Infoworks" brings up a mega-menu mostly of stuff I don't use.

GIS tools sometimes deal with this by having different "views" that are dedicated to a particular end product, for example Mapinfo used to have a "Geoplan View" and a "layout view" one for the data analysis tasks, one for making a presentable map to go into a report. ICM could (possibly, maybe, potentially) consider breaking the app down in a similar way, for instance having a "model edditing" mode and a "review results" mode. Or it could be exactly the same app as it is now with one main "view" but present in a different user-defined skin depending on what workflow the end user wants to implement. This is all food for thought, I am not a developer and can't be sure what is achievable, although I take my inspiration from other similarly complex apps e.g. Ableton Live, Photoshop, CAD packages GIS which are also feature-rich apps that have to be adapted to multiple types of workflow (depending on end user requirements). It is time to think outside the box and look at how other apps address these problems (even if they are not Civil Engineering apps), possibly look to other autodesk products for inspiration too as this user suggests.

Now a lot of the features are actually pretty good by and large and only improving. But there is now so many, it is making the app cluttered and somewhat bewildering to advanced users let alone newbies. Hence my idea of loading different skins for different workflows that might in themselves have different menu options depending on what what workflow the user wants to go for. This could still include an "omni mode" which just has everything in it all of the time.

Innovyze would have to look for commonalities to how people use the app to conceptually pin down what these "workflows" might look like and what options/features/icons/other needs to be preloaded and given visual emphasis. Although that is not an unsurmountable summit. It probably needs a creative skillset, hire someone with artistic inclinations from the typsetting or graphic design world to consult with. Go sit with some customers for a day and watch us build models and analyse results.

You are otherwise reliant on piecing together individual pieces of feedback scattered around this forum, and I would think that it would be difficult to develop a coherent roadmap to improve the GUI from that. If Innovyze wants to trail any revision of the GUI going forward please reach out as I would be delighted to participate!

I'd like to offer some insights regarding your graphic observations. InfoWorks ICM boasts many potential output parameters, significantly surpassing InfoSWMM, with a tally exceeding 4,000 parameters. The graphical representations within ICM are context-sensitive. For instance, in the absence of groundwater modeling, groundwater metrics remain concealed.
Moreover, ICM offers the flexibility to graphically represent different scenarios or simulations in three distinct methodologies, thereby providing a comprehensive and adaptable visualization platform. Furthermore, ICM enhances its user experience with the incorporation of custom graphs and observed graphs. A particularly commendable feature I appreciate is the succinct table appended below the graph, detailing maximum, minimum, and volume statistics