Unified Onboarding Experience for Product Suite

overview

Autodesk is a company that offers a wide range of software products for 3D design, engineering, and entertainment. These products aim to help people create and improve their world through design and innovation. The company's goal is to consistently provide high-quality user experiences and brand interactions for new and experienced customers across all its products. To achieve this, Autodesk focuses on identifying and prioritizing key opportunities to deliver cohesive, intuitive experiences throughout its products.

CHALLENGE

One of the challenges Autodesk faces is providing a consistent and positive experience across all of its products. This experience includes the trial period, account management, sign-in, and product onboarding. Inconsistencies in these areas may impact customer adoption, loyalty, and trust in the company. Data showed low trial conversions and prospect interviews who said it was too hard. To address this challenge, Autodesk needs to identify pain points and design solutions to improve the overall user experience. The goal is to deliver delightful, intuitive and meaningful experiences for our new customers, from consideration to use. Research shows that 74% of customers will drop off if the onboarding process is complex.

audience/user

First-time users of any product in the Autodesk suite

TEAM

1 UX Lead • 2 UX Designers • 2 UX Researchers • 1 tech lead • 1 Program manager • 1 content strategist

role

Sr. Product Designer: Research & UX design

research

Journey mapping • Competitive Analysis • Design Thinking Workshops

The Research team kicked off Discovery to understand user behavior, needs, and motivations. I created customer journey maps of our existing and competitors' products. Other team members conducted user interviews. Finally, we brought this compiled research to run a 2-day Design Thinking workshop of stakeholders from 10 business teams to help answer the question: "How can we deliver more cohesive experiences to our customers to manage their holistic relationship with Autodesk?" The Design Thinking workshop resulted in targetted personas and possible solutions to identified pain points.

Personas

design

Wireframes • User Flows • Prototypes

Our first area of focus was the “Learn & Work” step in the customer journey. Note the area of focus had been finalized with senior leadership before I came on board. Ideally, when starting projects, I refer to the data that helps support the hypothesis and better understand the problem to be solved. In this scenario, metrics such as customer abandonment rates and task completion time would help us define success.

Understanding from research findings that users would skip initial product tours, we came up with possible flows for onboarding new users to Autodesk products. These included concepts such as smart & personal, contextual, consistent and connected. We coined this as “just-in-time” learning.

Design Concepts

PROTOTYPING & USER TESTING

Rapid Prototyping • Moderated User Testing

The design concepts of ‘just-in-time’ learning were then transformed into an interactive prototype to be tested with our customers. NNgroup has reported that five users can find 80% of problems. Therefore we took an iterative user testing approach. After each round of user testing, we would incorporate the insights from the previous session to reveal new feedback. This allowed us to dig deep into creating a solution (Above is a link to the fourth version prototype.) Our goal was to start with 1 Autodesk product and once the solution was solidified roll the onboarding patterns out to all the Autodesk teams.

INSIGHTS

Users want to access the product with minimal friction, they do not want to be interrupted by onboarding. However, they want to easy access help when they decide they need it. Additionally, users learn best with interactive tutorials.

NEXT STEPS

After introducing the validated features, the next steps were to focus on version 2 of ‘Learn & Work’, which includes: deeper-level content in-product, personalization, error recovery steps, suggestive/predictive messages, user-generated content and badging/rewards. The goal is to move to the ideal final state of the Autodesk ecosystem.