Designing an in-product onboarding and contextual learning experience

goals

• Optimize the online experience for customers accessing Fusion Help and Learning content outside of the product canvas:

  • Instill confidence in new customers that they can learn Fusion quickly, increasing product adoption

  • Ensure that the Learning experience feels connected and cohesive across the web and the product

  • Help customers quickly scan and understand the help and learning options available to them

• Balance the goal of a scalable solution with the unique brand and experience needs of Fusion 360

my role

I worked alongside another UX designer on a team consisting of a product owner for the Learning Panel, content strategist. The core team also included a Fusion 360 product manager, search engine technical product manager, UX manager, and the senior director of industry strategy & business development.

scope

The scope of this project excluded the Fusion 360 support experience and authoring tools.

discovery & research

Interviews with existing Fusion 360 users generated several themes:

• Personalization options would be welcome. In this project, we focused on content tailored to onboarding users who were switching from Solidworks to Fusion.

• Customers would share feedback on what content is missing, and what content they need on an ongoing basis via multiple “voice of customer” channels.

• Rather than prompt people to search, ask them to type in what they want to do (e.g. I want to model a gearbox). In general support a more ‘Siri’ type approach to contextual search in the future.

We also conducted a competitive analysis of learning panels and web-based tutorials for a variety of design tools and tutorial content including Adobe products, Google, Lynda (now LinkedIn Learning), and Unity.

deliverables

With the requirements and customer feedback in mind, our design objectives were to:

• Simplify and optimize content to ensure clarity

• Build modularized, single-sourced content that could feed a variety of user interfaces across multiple products

• Provide a design framework that could scale across devices and platforms and degrade gracefully

• Provide contextual clues so customers can determine where they are within the Help/Learning system

Our audience:

• Primary - the established Solidworks user who wants to try Fusion 360. They are already experienced with CAD, have high expectations of the product, and as a busy professional, do not want to wade through lots of information.

• Secondary - net new customer. May be new to CAD/CAM and needs more help getting up to speed and understanding the basics.

Approach:

Using the principles of atomic design, we built the framework around modules, not pages. The benefits:

• Scalable - break complex page layouts into reusable solutions that can be extended and improved over time.

• Consistent - Create a library of visual and interaction patterns for a more cohesive experience and efficient testing.

• Flexible - elastic enough to meet our customers changing needs and the needs of our company.

KPIs & customer impact

As part of the broader product strategy, contribute to increased product adoption and customer retention. More specifically:

• Increase the number of monthly active users (MAUs)

• Increase the conversion rate of new users to MAUs

retrospective

The consensus from design leadership at Autodesk was that this was an amazing, cross-group effort to envision an improved in-product learning experience. They agreed that some good design concepts were proposed, and the Fusion Web team began development. However, those efforts stalled in 2018 with re-orgs and shifting priorities.

In 2019, Autodesk leadership made a new investment in an in-product learning dashboard, using some of the concepts from the Fusion 360 NSX project. Although I was moved onto other projects shortly thereafter, Fusion 360 did implement a learning panel and product adoption continues to grow.