With the advancement of computer aided design (CAD) tools, designed products are increasingly more sophisticated, making product assemblies more difficult to be visualized and understood. The purpose of this study was to evaluate a novel approach at interacting with CAD assembly models - exploded view with color-coded connecting lines. This visual method was evaluated against the common assembled view with specification tree method via a physical toy-product assembling task using the CAD model as a guide. Thirty participants took part in this study as extra credit for their course work. They were divided into two groups - one utilizing the proposed visual method of the CAD model while the other utilizing a regular assembled view model. Completion times and errors made while completing the task were recorded along with demographics information and subjective evaluation of the given task. Results showed that completion time was not significantly lower for participants using the proposed exploded view method. The errors made however were significantly lower for the group of participants using the proposed exploded view. The proposed exploded view with color-coded connecting line method is not an improvement over the assembled view in terms of completion time. It was an improvement however in terms of errors made.
