Autodesk
Client: Autodesk Customer Success
Company: Supply
Role: Creative Director
The Customer Success group at Autodesk faced a challenging situation due to its own success. After years of supporting off-platform user-generated content, they found that very few people were coming to Autodesk for official documentation and training.
Autodesk set out to empower industry creators to provide education across the industries they supported by way of short-form videos, written tutorials, and program tips and tricks for professionals. Their efforts paid off a little too well. Customers were choosing to engage with 3rd party platforms instead of Autodesk content. So, to bring their customers back into the fold, the CS team wanted to develop an offering that merged creator content with official documentation and certifications. I partnered with Autodesk to build a team and design the MVP learning platform and sub-brand. The MVP platform was acquired by the Autodesk University team and became the backbone of their learning management system.
Expandable Identity System
Once the concept was given the go-ahead, the challenge was creating a visual identity system that represented each unique industry, and the tools and services that Autodesk offered. On top of that, the system needed to be able to grow and scale over time as new services and tools became available.
We tackled the challenge by embodying the engineering and creative problem solving culture and developed an algorithm we could use to generate geometric shapes and colors. We iterated on dozens of patterns and textures, ultimately ending up with a design language that was glanceable, scalable, and aligned with the Autodesk core brand.
Guiding Principles
To ensure we were on the right track, we created a set of guiding principles that we could use to stay aligned and focused. Through this lens, we’d challenge the work, the organization’s assumptions, and the content to hone the offerings.
Focused
The platform should deliver a very focused, opinionated view of the ‘best practices’ for each of the supported professions. Additional content or links that do not support a user’s education along this journey will not be included.
Breathing Room
To help a user stay focused on the tasks at hand the experience should reluy heavily on white space and ample room between content types.
Easily Consumable
The platform's primary value offering is to provide a high level of education with minimal time commitment. Coursework should be easily glanceable and understood without the burden of pre-work or intensive time commitments.
Self Guided
The platform experience should be flexible enough to adapt to everyones learning style. May that be through pre-defined linear paths, or free form exploration. No content should be blocked by a users actions.
Trajectory Of Growth
Autodesk and Supply continued to expand upon the offering, growing it into a robust learning platform. Autodesk rebranded to provide a unified digital experience, and several other internal groups joined the effort to grow the content and technical capabilities. The platform was ultimately Split into two offerings: The customer Success Hub and the Partner Success Hub.
Autodesk Customer Success is more than traditional customer support; it is an engine for powering teams to the next level. The Customer Success Hub helps customers build a successful strategy covering everything from mission-critical support to optimizing important workflows.
The Partner Success Hub offers centralized access to relevant Accelerators, data sets, implementation guides, and other resources businesses can use to develop their service offerings, earn accreditations, and showcase their capabilities to Autodesk customers.