Overview
Background
As Autodesk moved to subscription business model, the barrier to try a product is low. With easy entry into a product, it’s also easy to abandon. It is very important to deliver delightful, intuitive, and meaningful experiences to subscribers throughout their journey of using Autodesk products.
Goal
Reduce the friction of learning Revit, enabling successful experiences for our customers.
Revit is a multidisciplinary building information modeling software for architects and engineers.
Introduction
This is a conceptual project. We have a small team of three people. We came up with a series of shared components for in-product onboarding and contextual leaning based on Revit. Other Autodesk products can also adopt them modularly one by one, or altogether as a full solution.
Highlights include
Integrated learning panel
Customization for learning/using the product
Guided pop-ups and pointers
Learning recommendations and bookmarks
My Role
UX Designer
Collaborator
UX Researcher
Learning Content Writer
User Research
The Universal New Subscriber
Research goal: to understand what influences Autodesk product subscribers’ experience.
Method: user interview
Participants: 12 Autodesk software subscribers
This user study is a qualitative research synthesis of findings from 10 runs of remote user interviews. A total of 12 new Autodesk software subscribers participated in the research. The analysis uncovered 5 key factors for how new subscribers measure their progress, effectiveness, and perceived success.
Conclusion
People respond well to things that are familiar to them, they gain confidence when they have a sense of progressing toward a goal, and they want to get their work done efficiently and to an expected level of quality.
The Revit New Subscriber
Research goal: to collect users’ ideas about how we can improve the experience of learning Revit.
Method: Interview + Rose, Bud, Thorn (LUMA method)
Participants: 20+ Revit users
After having a general understanding of how people learn Autodesk software. We had more in-depth research to know how people find the information they need to use Revit in Autodesk University Las Vegas 2018, which is the biggest event for Autodesk employees to contact customers directly.
User research in Autodesk University Las Vegas 2018
Key Findings
On-the-go learners look for specific tasks, a video is the go-to resource.
Trainers and evangelizers use webinars for specialized content.
Existing content is hard to navigate: they want ‘to the point’ content.
Videos need to be ‘scannable’ from a trusted source.
When everything else fails, they go to a forum.
Improvement Opportunities
Contextual learning/skill building
Consistent and connected experiences
Personalization
Data/analytics
Learning Strategy Matrix
Subscribers have varying degrees of experience…
with other Autodesk products
with competitive and related software
with technology in general
Thus, there are so many ways to be new…
new to product
new to feature or workflow
new to project solution
new to industry
We broke down our customers’ experience by product knowledge (I know how to use this product / I don't know how to use this product) and industry experience (I know what I need to do / I don't know what I need to do). From there, we started to think about the types of content that best serves them. (These are just a few examples, not an exhaustive list.)
Design
Design Principles
A strong foundation that guided our decision making.
Help & Learning Panel
And here comes our solution — Help & Learning Panel: all-inclusive access to learning and support in one place, not requiring people to go to an external help site. It is designed specifically for first-use experiences but also provides ongoing guidance for subscribers as they progress from new to mastery.
Learning Preferences
In order to provide meaningful learning content, we need to figure out what preferences are for which group of users. With the learning preference settings, we can…
improve UI scalability to support multiple disciplines.
let users feel the learning content was tailored for them.
make the software is less overwhelming to use.
Curated Search
Quick access to "help me learn" or "get me un-stuck" information within the product.
“My Dashboard” Card
Encourage learning progression and provide a personal place to get back to saved information.
“What’s New” Card
Following a software update provide access to content that helps people learn about new features.
Tutorials Card
Step-by-step guidance for how to do things in the software.
User Testing
We validated how the Help & Learning Panel helps onboarding new Revit subscribers with 5 participants over the world. Here are the insights:
We can’t get rid of current contextual enhanced tooltips, people want a quick hint without having to open the panel if they don’t need it.
Quick and contextual help needs to be closer to the visual focus for it to be effective.
Content needs to be highly visual, to the point, curated and provide ways to control it .
The panel seems to help in providing access to help without leaving the product was highly valued.
Advantages
Autodesk
Increases adoption by keeping subscribers engaged in the product.
Increases retention by helping subscribers go from new-to-mastery with the right info at the right time.
Re-use of code and existing connected experiences decreases waste.
Gather insights for measures of subscriber activeness and learn-work usage patterns.
Subscriber
Consistent experiences reduce learning curves in new products and across product workflows.
Easy access to knowledge, in-context to reduce the friction of learning while using the product.
Connected experiences to promote self-help, troubleshooting and feedback.
Vision
Where do we start?
Reduce the friction of learning Revit for our new subscribers.
Where do we want to land?
Supports onboarding and contextual learning in a data-centric workflow across Autodesk AEC (Architecture, Engineering & Construction) products.
Data Collection Plan
We can measure the success of the design and inform future iterations. And we can use data to inform decisions if other ADSK products are facing different user requirements when adopting the help & learning panel.
Collect baseline measure before and after the integration of the help & learning panel.
Collect and analyze user activity in the help & learning panel.
Look for patterns of activity between command/tool usage and subsequent content access (and vice versa).
Collect feedback from all new users through standardized open questions.
Measure the first experience with an impressions scorecard, possibly combine with survey questions.
Collect feedback from forums and social media (monitor community sentiment).
Takeaway
Work with Your User
Through this project we have realized that as designers of the product we are always at least a little bit biased towards ourselves. We worked hard to establish a meaningful relationship with our users and – although not perfect – this project provided insight into the value of what we do and the importance of making sure that we never lose sight of the meaning behind our work.