A360 DESIGN COLLABORATION PLATFORM
Description
A360, Autodesk's flagship product under the 360 brand, is a collaboration tool targeting architects, designers, engineers, manufacturers, and their collaborators. This cloud-based application allows the extended design team, including those without CAD software, to access and review 2D and 3D CAD and design data.
*A360 is live - try it out for free.
Business Context and Project Relevance
A360 plays a key role in Autodesk’s strategy of migrating to the cloud. It extends the reach of our products by addressing not only the immediate needs of our customers but also those of their extended ecosystems of use.
The organization attempted to accelerate this transition to cloud-based solutions by purchasing a social platform with a team in another part of the world.
Through a launch-and-learn approach with an initial MVP, it became apparent that the acquired tool's underlying social model did not meet the complex data and collaboration needs of the Autodesk customer. The Cloud Platform User Experience team was tasked with reimagining the entire product experience from the ground up.
My Role
As the UX Architect leading a team of ten designers, visual designers, and researchers responsible for the reimagining of the experience for A360, I:
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Evangelized the application's experience architecture and created guiding principles for ongoing design and development work, resulting in improved alignment.
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Coordinated design efforts across our San Francisco, Portland, Tel Aviv, and Hyderabad teams.
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Advocated for our customers' needs, partnering with our researchers to increase the team's knowledge about who our customers were and what they needed.
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Mentored junior designers as they learned about Autodesk customers and how to work successfully in a complex environment.
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Was a thought partner to more senior designers, allowing us to use more collaborative design methods.
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Created a UX quality process that was programized and implemented by our UX research lead.
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Partnered with other teams to integrate the data and collaboration platform for their customer's needs.
Impact
User retention increased by 35%, MAU attained a 102% YoY growth (to 500k)
The release garnered significant positive responses from customers on forums and through other feedback mechanisms. It also resulted in several large enterprise sales, which were received positively by internal stakeholders who needed to integrate it into their offerings.
Customer quotes:
"Of all the cloud-based collaboration tools I’ve tried so far, (including PlanGrid, CurrentSet and Dropbox), A360 has been the most intuitive and useful."
"Refreshingly simple enabler for my project shares! Fits my flexible work locations and no hurdle for my non-CAD colleagues."
"I think this program is awesome, I am completely new to cad and I find it very intuitive."
"[I] really like this new A360 design. Much cleaner and easier to browse and share."
"Excellent! A huge improvement over the original A360 interface."
"Massive improvement compared to the previous version"
"Easy,friendly, powerful, complete."

This is the default homepage for the A360 experience.


