A360 DESIGN COLLABORATION PLATFORM

Description

A360, the flagship product in Autodesk's 360 brand, is a collaboration tool targeted at architects, designers, engineers, and manufacturers - and the people they collaborate with. This cloud-based application allows the extended design team, including those without access to 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 an 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 underlying social model of the acquired tool did not meet the complex data and collaboration needs of the Autodesk customer. The Cloud Platform User Experience team was tasked with a ground up redesign of the entire product experience.

My Role

As the UX Architect leading a team of ten designers, visual designers and researchers responsible for the complete re-imagining of the experience for A360 I:

evangelized the experience architecture for the application and created guiding principles for ongoing design and development work, resulting in improved alignment .
coordinated design efforts across our San Francisco, Portland, Tel Aviv and Hyderabad teams.
was an advocate for our customers needs, partnering with our researchers to increase overall team knowledge about who our customers were and what they needed.
mentored junior designers as they learned about Autodesk customers and how to be successful working in a complex environment.
was a thought-partner to more senior designers, allowing us to use more collaborative design methods.
created a UX quality process which was programized and taken on by our UX research lead.
partnered with other teams to integrate as 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 response from customers on forums and through other feedback mechanisms. It also resulted in landing several large enterprise sales and was 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."