Autodesk
Optimize the customer’s experience of finding the right product, which increases CTR on the free-trial button by 20%.
Autodesk Inc. is an American corporation that provides software for architecture, entertainment, and manufacturing industries.
During my time here, I worked on the Consider-Buy team whose mission is to provide meaningful information on our commercial website so that customers clearly understand our product’s features. Following that mission, I collaborated with a product manager to build a tool that suggest a suitable product for our customer based on their needs.
Location
May — Aug 2022
Time
Team
San Francisco, USA
UX Design Manager
A Senior UX Designer
A Product Manager
User Interviews
Usability Testing
Affinity Diagramming
Wireframing
Prototyping
UX Design
BACKGROUND
Many users struggled to choose a product that met their needs
AUTODESK is a company that makes software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, and entertainment industries. In FY22, our user report showed that our customers struggled to find the right product to start a free trial.
Many products, and if you are new to Autodesk (as I am), it's very disorientating to try to figure out which products to focus on.
— CES 5, Research, AutoCAD LT, AMER US, Feb ‘22
IMPACT
The solution is a product recommender tool
After doing some research, I delivered a product recommender tool that suggests our customers the right product based on the business’s requirements such as the industry, the company’s size, and its workflow. Here were some positive impact that we could generate:
10%
+2K
-10
10% increase of click-rate on free trial button
I tried to keep the onboarding at most 5 questions to make sure it is quick and easy for members to complete
10% increase on customer’s satisfaction
In May 2024, the onboarding flow will be launched to mass users.
10% reduction in issue reported
In May 2024, DoSomething will launch the renovating design of its digital platform for mass users. With calculations from our Communication department, we promise that this new onboarding flow will reduce the drop-out rate by 10%.
PROCESS
UX Process in the corporation
In this project, we followed the Double Diamond framework to deploy our problem. Because of time constraints (12 weeks), the main focus of our work is on the Define stage.
To get started, I led a meeting with stakeholders to understand the status of the problems. Then, I and a product manager conducted user research to learn more about our customers. Having all the information, I analyzed the data and wireframed.
DISCOVERY
Identify the scale and the scope of the problem
Our team started by reviewing quantitative data reported through the CES dashboard. From then, we realized that the problem of users struggling to find the right product was huge as researching products was the second-highest need when users visit our website.
CES Dashboard
Moreover, when asking "How should we improve?", 5.4K wished to have a tool to guide them towards the right products. However, when presenting our findings, this problem was acknowledged but there were other major issues.
User Feedback form
DISCOVERY
From these data, we only get general information about the status of the problem. However, thanks to that information, I had some questions as hypotheses/goals for user testing:
Which stage of the search experience do customers struggle to find the product?
Why is it difficult?
What they will do when facing difficulties in finding the right product?
Our next step was to launch a user testing into the search behavior of our users from an open search on the internet and the usability of our website in assisting users in the finding products experience.
Overall insight
8/10 customers are confused about which products are used in which situations or stages of the projects
7/10 customers have misunderstood the collection is a separate product
From the click map on UserTesting.com, I and my product manager created this user journey map to describe how our visitors explore the Autodesk.com website. The most common path was: Opean search — Homepage — Universal Header — Product Center.
Dig deeper into customer’s experience of finding the right product
Breaking problems into details from the user journey map
Problem 1 — Customers need to jump in-out between 3rd-parties and our website to search for products
Most of the customers read general information on third-party website and then search for the products on our websites. Third parties give general information on many products, which confused users to choose the right one.
Problem 2 — The filter suggests too many products and doesn’t reflect the users’ needs.
To find the right products, customers usually use the filter to sort them out.
3/10 of users reported the filter doesn't reflect their situation, causing them confusion about what they should tick.
After ticking all their needs, the filter still suggested a list of products that confused them about which one they should start with
DEFINE
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Finding the right product is hard because the process involves many guesses on the filter's functionality and jumping in-out review websites to research relevant information
IDEATION
Brainstorming ideas for improvements with competitive analysis
Before coming up with “HMW…” questions, I did a competitive analysis on other SASS platforms to see how they could help their customers to understand how their products could fit into their customer’s workflow. Then, I took some notes on advantages and disadvantages of their solutions:
01. Salesforce with an onboarding quiz about business needs
Salesforces launched a quiz that asks customers about their business’s needs and customers could reflect on their situations rather than questioning the features of the products.
However, establishing such a tool would need a huge effort from content, research, & engineering to build.
02. Atlassian & Adobe showcase the process map of how customers could use their products to run a company
Atlassian and Adobe provided a general understanding of how the products support the process of different teams, which tackle the right needs of customers. Customers were clearly explained how to incorporate the software to support their business. This seems to be the most effortless solution to take on.
03. Unity provided the interactive Get-help center
Unity has a chat bot where customers can ask any questions about their products. Building this model requires a huge effort from content, research, and engineering.
IDEATION
How might we … questions
HMW help customers to minimize the list of products to choose the one?
HMW makes the process of finding new products shorter and more informed?
HMW actively guides customers to use our assisting tool?
WIREFRAME
Mapped our current solutions with competitors
After seeing other solutions from competitors, we led a meeting with our stakeholders to present our findings. We found that in our company, solutions related to this problem were being ideated in many ways. However, no one had a mutual goal in tackling this problem. My role was to summarize the solutions and which stages they were at.
Considerate solutions to kick-off a project
After gathering all information from a lot of stakeholders, our team has an overview of how this problem is being tackled across an organization.
However, our team is Consider-Buy, we prioritized related projects and decided to work further on deploying the product finder tool because solutions are ideated but not tested yet.
Filter Optimization
Current project — Other designers are working on this
Visual Map
This is our focus
Recommendation tool
IDEATION
Visualizing the solutions in detail
I collaborated with my product manager to review all the insights that we had in the last meeting and user research. Then, we came up with questions about building a complete product recommender with finalized content.
01. Where should the product recommender live on our platform?
On the page Shop-all-product:
Most of the users interact with the filter to sort out the product that meets their needs.
Therefore, placing a product recommender tool may helps our users
On the separate page:
In our research, one of the problems is that customer needs to jump in and out of the review page and product page.
Therefore, creating a separate page for a product recommender tool may help to bridge the gap. Its gateway will be on the universal header.
02. What and How many questions should we ask our customers?
I read the information on our website and worked with the content team to understand the organization of our web information. Then, I compressed the insights into the flow like this.
WIREFRAME
Wireframing for solutions
I and my product manager led a presentation on our UX research and proposed those solutions. As Autodesk has a very organized design system, I used those elements to wireframe our solutions.
02. Separate page
01. In-page solution
PROTOTYPE
Prototype
I and my product manager led a presentation on our UX research and proposed those solutions. As Autodesk has a very organized design system, I used those elements to wireframe our solutions.
02. Separate page
01. In-page solution
TEST
Internal feedback
We reached out to 6 stakeholders including UX researchers, content writers, design managers, and other UX designers to try our designs. Here are
01. Easy to access and interact
6/6 said that both solutions were easy to interact. They don’t need to make any mental notes on their situations to answer the questions.
02. Clearer final choice
5/6 agreed that they could nail down the final selections on the product that suits their needs.
03. Limited in-page design
However, the in-page design is limited to the user experience. Placing it with the filter is confusing.
TEST
Next steps Identify key metrics for A/B testing
Product Vision
Product Vision
We need more effort in defining the requirements of develop the product recommender too:
1. How many questions should we ask our customers about their situation?
2. What should we ask them?
3. How should we train our data so that it could suggest the right product for our customer?
Identify key metrics for A/B testing
After wireframing and prototyping, I and my product manager led a final presentation showcasing our solutions. Then, moving on our next steps, our seniors mentioned about defining the metrics for A/B testing. This was what we discussed:
10% reduction in issues reported in the survey.
From UX research, I found the problem reported through a UX survey. Therefore, we took that as a measurement for our success.
10% increase in the click rate of the “free-trial” button
In Consider—Buy team, we have some concrete metrics to evaluate the success of our solution. One of them is the click-rate on the free-trial button. By launching this, we hope that we could see 10% increase in the click rate of the free-trial button.
LESSONS
Moving forward with lessons
Working in a big and well-established organization, I got a chance to learn how designers use both qualitative and quantitative data to support their ideas and persuade stakeholders through presentations. I learned that presentation and story telling are essential for designers and continue to practice these skills after all.
01. Being pragmatic in design with UX data
Great collaboration = Clear Communication = Clear design goals
Working in the triad team PM, UX, and Engineer, I found it hard to reach common ground with the team and move forward because each person has their view on the problem we are solving. I learned that our mutual goal is the best way to align the practices within our triad team.