Autodesk help content overhaul
Improving website findability to help customers get assistance with their software
content modeling - design system patterns & components - navigation - A/B testing
Customers visiting a help and learning site have one goal: solve their problem efficiently and get back to work.
Instead, when customers came to the help section of the Autodesk website looking for assistance with software licenses and installation, they were met with an overwhelming array of articles organized in an unintuitive way. Even when the information they needed was already on the site, traffic to those pages was low, and customers were submitting support tickets for common issues.
We restructured the content and navigation in the midst of a corporate rebrand, a migration from Drupal to Adobe Experience Manager, and helped shape a developing design system.
impact
10%
increase in aggregate CES score
92%
average increase in CTR on navigational links
53%
average decrease in CTR on “contact support” CTA
The team
product manager
content strategist
visual designer
web publisher
data analyst
My role
helped define project scope and A/B test parameters
acted as liaison between experience design, UX research, content strategy, product, engineering, analytics, design systems, and marketing stakeholders
interviewed internal subject matter experts
created content model diagrams
contributed patterns to the Autodesk design system and AEM components
Understanding the problem
During the discovery and research phase, the experience design and content strategy teams conducted interviews with internal subject matter experts, reviewed qualitative and quantitative data and customer feedback, mapped tasks to personas, and consulted with the analytics team. We conducted an initial A/B test to validate top customer tasks. These findings heavily informed the content audit and new information architecture of the customer support section, both completed by the content strategy team.
Meanwhile, I had in-depth discussions with stakeholders (product management, content strategy, visual design, web publishing, analytics, engineering, and design system team) to understand business goals, specific requirements, prior work, and constraints.
Distilling patterns
I created a content model and wireframes for new page templates, then partnered with a visual UX designer to iterate on navigation menu designs. We participated in frequent reviews with the design systems team to use existing patterns where available.
Our initial designs did adhere strictly to existing patterns and AEM components to minimize the workload on an over-extended engineering team. When initial metrics showed that our goals weren't being met, we conducted several rounds of A/B tests and were able to make a case for building a variation on an existing component.
Validating and iterating
After initial release of the new Download & install pages, we initially saw more clicks on the contact support CTA while traffic continued trending down. We hypothesized that the overhaul led customers to click straight into contact support, rather than figure out which self-service path to take. In brainstorming sessions with web optimization, we decided to run a series of A/B tests to:
optimize button copy
test variations on the cards and designs
test button colors
surface the top three articles from each support category
Test #4 was a definitive success, with a significant drop on the contact support CTR and increased CTR on informational links.
Results
Our redesign resulted in a drastic increase in traffic to pages that answered common problems and a decrease in customer support cases for those problems, suggesting that customers were able to self-solve quickly and reduce case load for Autodesk support agents.
