Another Review of the Spore 3D Printing Service

A while back I shared my experience with the new Spore Sculptor 3D printing service. I was happy with my character and recommended the service. An unfavorable review has recently been posted on the Spore forum. This experience highlights a number of issues custom product manufacturers will have to address if they want to reach the mainstream.

1. Set Expectations Correctly

3D printers are a new development for consumers and most don’t know what to expect. High end 2D printers can print photos equal in quality or better than what you get at a pharmacy photo counter. Given that, why would they expect anything different from a “3DPrinter”?

Grittiness - The current state of the art in 3D printing doesn’t come close to approximating industry standard injection molding and often disappoints.

Limited Production Range – If something can’t be done well, don’t offer it or at least provide a warning. This customer was frustrated because their starship scale model lacked detail. It would have to be 3X as big before you would get a reasonable level of detail. A very limited range of products look good using this process at small scale and instructions should be provided.

Giving people an idea of what to expect will go a long way towards a better customer experience.

2. Illustrate Best Practices

On-demand manufacturing is a new form of commerce and creates unique challenges. You can’t preview the good you are buying and this manufacturing process has quirks. New kinds of ecommerce will doubtless arise to solve this problem, until then:

Design Galleries - Every company doing mass customization should have a gallery of what gets built by its customers. FigurePrints does it on a small scale, but why not show hundreds of designs? The more designs you see the easier it becomes to see what looks good and what looks terrible. Taking the WarCraft characters as an example, the larger races, like the Tauren tend to print out better than the Gnomes. With the Spore characters you want your character to have a 1:1 or 2:1 height to width ratio to get good detailing. These are not the easiest things to explain, but if you see enough examples it becomes intuitive.

3. Provide Useful Feedback

The Spore Sculptor site provides very limited instructions on what can and can’t be made. They list the names of the parts, but why not show them? Provide a scale so customers have an idea of how big or small they will be. Even something as simple as showing the characters orientation on the pedestal would be a huge improvement e.g. The spaceship this customer ordered was put on backward because no preview is offered.

These companies should be applauded for creating new offerings like this. They are important first steps and will improve with time. These services are great if you know how the process works and what to expect. Until custom manufacturing process reach parity with traditional methods the shopping experience is as important as the finished good.

One more gratuitous 3D printer image:

Tagged as: Business, Injection molding, mass customization, Printing