Beyond Schematic Capture: Meaningful Abstractions for Better Electronics Design Tools

Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design tools are critical in helping users build non-trivial electronics devices. While recent work recognizes deficiencies with current tools and explores novel methods, little has been done to understand modern designers and their needs. To gain better insight into their practices, we interview fifteen electronics designers of a variety of backgrounds. Our open-ended, semi-structured interviews examine both overarching design flows and details of individual steps. One major finding was that most creative engineering work happens during system architecture, yet current tools operate at lower abstraction levels and create significant tedious work for designers. From that insight, we conceptualize abstractions and primitives for higher-level tools and elicit feedback from our participants on clickthrough mockups of design flows through an example project. We close with our observation on opportunities for improving board design tools and discuss generalizability of our findings beyond the electronics domain.