Autodesk Design Academy was Autodesk Education Experiences group's primary content and community platform. The Design Academy platform was redesigned and rebuilt in 2015 to accommodate the needs of the growing user base. After its launch in May 2015, the platform experienced exponential growth, with registered users increasing from less than 2,000 to over 30,000 by February 17, 2016.
As the design lead for the Autodesk Design Academy, I led the UX/UI design of the platform, developed the visual language, and briefly acted as the Product Owner in the Agile development process. In addition, I helped to built the platform strategy and development plan together with the Senior Manager of Learning Strategy, Jamie Perkins.
The Case Study
Back in 2014, the Autodesk Design Academy platform only had 3,000 registered users and did not have a learning management system (LMS) for sharing learning content. The learning content on the platform was shared as long blog posts, downloadable files, or video embeds from streaming services like YouTube. In 2015, the Autodesk Education Experiences team was given the task of designing and building a community platform that includes a custom LMS and a portfolio functionality for 3D students to share their design work created with Autodesk 3D software. I was the Lead Designer in the project.
The primary objective for building this platform was to expand Autodesk’s influence among 3D designers and design students. There was no major portfolio platform available for mechanical engineering, architecture, animation, and other 3D design students at that time.
LET’s Find out what the studens need and want
Our approach was to leverage our existing community platform and student outreach teams to engage with students. While Autodesk was already making strides in student engagement through industry events and design competitions, we recognized the need for a more systematic customer research approach. We conducted surveys and interviews with students to gain a deeper understanding of their needs and expectations for a platform like this.
After obtaining research insights, we developed user personas and a list of desired features for prioritization and testing. We also created a stakeholder map to visualize who we needed to focus on throughout the entire project.
MApping the journeys
Before diving into designing concepts, we first created journey maps to understand the learning experience of the students on our platform. Our aim was to figure out how to guide new users towards more engagement on a monthly basis, and to encourage them to return for new content, learning events, and design competitions.
We also held workshops and co-creation sessions with students at the Autodesk University event in Las Vegas to ensure that the upcoming platform would truly address their needs.
Creating Designs
The UX design process involved drafting design concepts based on research insights and co-creation sessions. We also created more detailed wireframes of the essential features such as the LMS. After discussing the wireframes with stakeholders and ensuring that the entire team was satisfied with the direction, we conducted some early user testing to confirm that we were heading in the right direction.
After sharing the wireframes with students to gather early feedback, we began refining the designs. It was also the right time to develop a visual language for the platform. We used the Autodesk brand guidelines as our starting point for the visual language, and worked on it collaboratively with the brand team.
Testing the results
After launching the platform, we conducted further user testing using two different online tools: Usertesting.com and Inspectlet. The purpose was to observe how students were using the platform and identify any issues they might encounter. While these tools provided some insight into potential problems, they did not fully explain why these issues were occurring or what the users were thinking. Although Usertesting.com allowed testers to voice their thoughts, many did not provide thorough feedback, leaving us with unanswered questions. However, in our encounters at our student outreach events, we were able to interview more students and I’m happy to say that the feedback was mostly positive.