Unified Help Platform

Background

Autodesk, a leader in 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software, transitioned from boxed software to a SaaS model. This shifted purchases from resellers to direct online subscription sales and raised customer expectations for faster, more direct support.

Problem

Customers were frustrated. Help was hard to find, and human contact options were scattered, inefficient, and often buried. There was no clear path to answers.

My Role

Design lead in a triad with product and engineering, Facilitator, Research Partner

• Led the end-to-end experience design of this first major cross-org initiative for support, from discovery to concept through MVP launch. Drove user validation, iteration, and strategic scaling across global digital properties, customer lifecycle stages and features.

• Product Design Strategy, Competitive Analysis, Brainstorming Workshops, Early Concepts, Wireframes, Prototypes, Usability Testing, User Stories, Quarterly Roadmap Planning

• ⚠️ Overlap in support routing emerged as a challenge. I brought together global customer service teams and organized brainstorming sessions to align on and document a cleaner, more efficient grouping of issues.

Solution

A 0-1 modular help platform that brought everything into one place - help articles for purchasing, account management, installation, troubleshooting, and live agent access.

3-Part Experience:

• Issue Classification: Users followed decision trees or asked questions, processed through entity recognition and ML

• In-Context Self-Service: Curated answers, dynamic search results, and Watson-powered workflows delivered help instantly

• Personalized Agent Access: Smart routing to the right human - via scheduled calls, live chat, or case creation

Outcome

• Rolled out across 7,000+ web pages, reaching millions of users in 40 countries and 24 languages

• Drove a 5% lift in cart additions and 2% more orders placed

• Enabled 74% of users to self-serve without agents - saving $750K in 6 months

• Reduced support team complexity by narrowing agent skills to 5 categories, improving AI routing and cutting case transfers

• Laid the foundation for future AI integration

Takeaway

Our best breakthroughs came from huddling around a whiteboard, sketching ideas and untangling problems together. None of it would’ve been possible without the incredible coordination and collaboration across product, design, engineering, and systems teams.