Eric Suesz
Every engineer has had the same thought right after submitting a feature request: “I wonder if anyone will actually read this.”
We do. Many of the improvements in InfoDrainage begin with a simple observation: “I really wish it could do this:”
- Someone takes a few minutes to submit an idea on the Autodesk Water Feedback Portal.
- Other engineers vote because they’ve encountered the same challenge.
- Our product team digs into the problem, explores possible solutions, and that idea becomes part of a future release.
Here are three examples of customer ideas from InfoDrainage customers that became reality.
Customer feedback added swale velocity calculations
One customer pointed out that while InfoDrainage could model swale stormwater controls, it couldn’t report flow velocity. That meant engineers either had to perform manual calculations or remodel the swale as a trapezoidal channel, losing functionality such as infiltration and pollution mitigation.
“When a key result is missing, engineers end up relying on workarounds,” says InfoDrainage Product Manager Javier Soto. “Adding it completes the swale picture and makes the results far more useful.”
Others agreed, with 49 customers voting to add automatic swale velocity calculation. Thanks to this request, in InfoDrainage 2026.2 we added maximum swale velocity directly to the hydraulic results.
Engineers can now:
- Evaluate erosion risk with the swale
- Select appropriate lining and vegetation
- Design check dams and other flow control measures
- Keep the swale modelled correctly as a stormwater control instead of a simplified channel
Our customers no longer need to compromise when designing swales. They can take advantage of all the additional benefits attached to green SuDS infrastructure and ensure all of it is represented correctly in their hydraulic analysis. The result is a more complete hydraulic assessment directly within the SWC workflow, avoiding manual calculations or modelling workarounds.
Automatic longitudinal profiles save drainage design time
From the feedback portal, we also noticed that drainage designers were creating longitudinal drainage profiles for gravity networks, which was a manual and time-consuming process. Customers found it annoying to build profiles individually for main lines and branches. It really slowed down their design process.
“Creating flow paths and profiles manually could be tedious enough that users simply avoided doing it,” worried Soto. “Reducing the time it takes to map an entire network down to seconds makes it much easier to explore and analyse the network.”
Forty-three votes later, we released InfoDrainage2026.1, which automatically generates longitudinal drainage profiles for the network.
This allows engineers to:
- Automatically generate profiles from selected nodes or outfalls—or the entire network
- Quickly visualize flow paths across the drainage network
- Review the full system behavior along a profile without manually tracing it
- Save time when designing, modifying and analyzing drainage designs
This kind of enhancement that may seem incremental, but for engineers designing drainage systems every day, the result is a faster and more consistent way to create drainage profiles, allowing engineers to focus more on design decisions rather than building profile views manually.
Import Phase simplifies collaborative drainage design
Some of the requests encourage us to stop and ask more questions. Sometimes, our product managers reach out to learn more–or even schedule a short video chat. This is especially true when we want to understand more about how teams collaborate with our software.
For example, we heard a request from a user who wanted to combine more than one InfoDrainage model. They regularly divided up projects on a large site into smaller parcels for multiple teams to analyse. When they wanted to bring the designs back together and look at the results of the entire project site, they ran into an issue: not everything they wanted to import would import cleanly.
Many other users chimed in and voted up the idea, which is how the Import Phase feature made its way to InfoDrainage 2027, giving users a new way to import phases from other InfoDrainage files or bring an existing phase into the current phase within the same model.
This allows engineers to:
- Combine phases developed in separate files
- Consolidate work produced by different teams
- Bring all elements of a phase into the current model
- Perform analysis across the full site without maintaining multiple models
The result is a more flexible workflow for collaborative projects and phased developments, enabling engineers to consolidate models and perform whole-site hydraulic analysis more easily.
“Collaborative workflows and iterative design alternatives are essential in modern projects,” Soto notes. “This feature makes it easier to develop solutions separately and then combine the preferred option.”
Your feedback helps shape what’s next
Those are a few examples of ideas that began as customer feedback and became product improvements. Every suggestion, vote, and discussion helps us better understand where engineers spend their time, what slows them down, and which improvements will have the biggest impact.
Do you have an idea for InfoDrainage?
- We’d love to hear it: Visit the Autodesk Water Feedback Portal to submit your new ideas—or vote for existing ideas.
- What’s coming next? The Autodesk Water Infrastructure drainage design roadmap shows you what we’re working on next.
- Stay informed: Never miss a product update by subscribing to our LinkedIn newsletter.