Design-Ease 8

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What's new in Design-Ease 8

New graphics and improved interface

  • Half-normal selection of important effects on all factorial designs*: Simple and robust method for selecting important effects—formerly available only for two-level designs.  For example, the screen shot to the right is from an experiment on 5 woods glued with 5 adhesives, using 2 applicators with 4 clamps at 2 pressures.  The vital effects become apparent at a glance!
    *(Detailed in “Graphical Selection of Effects in General Factorials”—winner of the Shewell Award for best presentation at the 2007 Fall Technical Conference, co-sponsored by the American Society for Quality and the American Statistical Association.)
  • Smoother color gradations on 2D contours: More impressive for presentations to management, clients, or colleagues.
  • Rounded contour values: More presentable defaults requiring less ‘fiddling’ for reporting purposes.
  • Plant flags on 3D surfaces: Previously, you could only put flags on 2D contour plots.  To the right we see a flag planted by numerical optimization to maximize the filtration rate in an industrial process.
  • New and fully configurable mesh option that reflects smooth, lighted colors off your 3D surface: Dazzle your customers and colleagues while providing highly-informative graphics showing how responses will react to process changes. (Mesh can be turned off if you like.)
  • 3D graphs that you can spin with your mouse: When you see your cursor turn into a hand, simply grab and rotate!  Double-click the graph to go back to the starting angle.
  • Push-button averaging on the factors tool: Provides far easier main effects plotting and makes interactions more meaningful.  Previously, the only option to average factors came via a hidden drop-list.
  • More-interactive cube plots: Click on design points to see factor levels and response predictions on graph legends.
  • Enter input variables vertically: When entering many levels, this may be more convenient than the horizontal layout
  • Reference lines on plots: Horizontal, vertical, and free style-lines enhance plots.
  • Predicted vs. Actual graph availability in Model Graphs, not just in Diagnostics: This is useful when a response has been transformed because in Model Graphs mode, you can change the view back to the more relevant original scale.
  • Confidence, prediction, and tolerance intervals (CI, PI & TI) plotted with configurable colors in one-factor response plots: Convey prediction uncertainties via bands around the best fit.
  • Color-coded response surface graphs show where standard error increases: This makes it easier to understand why extrapolating beyond the actual experimental region for a prediction will get you into trouble.  The graphic shows a flag set beyond the factorial points in a fractional factorial—ultimately making the prediction meaningless (high standard error is indicated by the dark shading).

More choices when custom-designing your experiment

  • D-, IV-, and A-optimal design selection: New and expanded optimization criteria for use when crafting algorithmically designed experiments of a specified model order.
  • Tolerance-interval-based design sizing: Enhances your fraction of design space (fds) plots to assess whether your planned experiment is large enough, given the underlying variability (noise), to establish tolerances within the acceptable range.

Additional statistics and more concise reporting of vital results

  • Improved curvature testing for factorials with center points: All design points are now fitted to the polynomial model used for predictions.  This provides a more realistic impact of significant non-linear response behavior.  Diagnostics can be done for the model adjusted for curvature or, via a view option, unadjusted.  Models without a term for curvature (unadjusted) are used for model graph and point predictions.
  • Coefficients summary: After modeling your response(s), see a concise table of coefficients that’s color-coded by relative significance.
  • Tolerance interval (TI) estimates on point prediction: This is important for verification studies to ensure your process stays within manufacturing specifications.

Increased visibility and versatility of tools and features

  • Many new, high-visibility tools: Options previously available via hidden View menu options are now easily seen and capitalized upon.
  • Design layout column widths now adjust automatically by double-clicking column-header boundaries: Multiple columns adjust simultaneously!
  • Attach row comments by right-clicking on the row headers.  View them by right-clicking on the Select box and selecting “Comments” as a column header: A handy way to record important observations.
  • Row comments are also visible when a point is highlighted on a plot.
  • Topic Help, Tutorials, and Sample Files now also reside in the main Help menu: Follow these alternate paths for getting timely program advice.
  • In addition, Topic Help (F1) content has been greatly enhanced.  Context-specific information is right at your fingertips.  Simply press the F1 key to discover options, definitions, and suggestions.
  • Screen Tips is now a main menu item (“Tips”): Great visibility and easy access to very useful just-in-time advice.

Enhanced Design Evaluation

  • Several new matrix measures are now provided: Most notable is the G-efficiency.  (This criterion, expressed on a 0 to 100 percent scale with higher being better, leads to designs that generate more consistent variance of your predicted response.  However, like any other single measure, it may not accurately reflect the overall effectiveness of a particular matrix.  That’s why Design-Ease provides an array of matrix statistics and graphics for overall design evaluation.)
  • New, powerful tools for multiple response optimization: Options include standard error models. All else equal, choose system settings in regions predicted to exhibit the highest precision.

Many things made nicer, easier faster throughout the program

  • One-click updates: Check for free software updates with one click and download them directly.
  • Better defaults and tick marks: Nicely rounded values provide presentable graphs straight away.
  • Zoom up graphs with your mouse wheel (a right-click resets to original size): Quickly zero in on regions of interest.
  • Hold down your left mouse button to drag graphs into various positions (a right-click resets original placement): It’s a fast way to situate the region of interest where you want it in the coordinate space. Factors G and H in the trace plot at right are constrained to very tight ranges relative to other ingredients. They are hardly visible without first zooming and then dragging the intersection (the overall centroid of the formulation space) to the middle.
  • Separate preference tabs for X-Y versus surface graphs: Design-Ease v8 delivers plotting and graphing simplicity.
  • Reduced graph-updating flicker: Now it’s less distracting when you redraw responses at varying input-variable levels.
  • Keyboard shortcut for preferences: Press Ctrl + F8 to get a box allowing you to adjust all of the program preferences with one click, a convenient way to reset all of the default settings.
  • Color-by-point-type added to graph columns: Very useful addition to scatter-plots.

Technical stuff programmers will appreciate

  • Upgraded MFC (Microsoft Foundation Class) common controls: This new application framework provides an improved look and feel.
  • XML utility offers new script feature that lists all possible commands. You can parse files with extensions other than .xml. It also provides new import/export/reset-preference commands: TRANSLATION: More power to operate Design-Ease programmatically.

 

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