Autodesk

One Portal To Rule Them All

Autodesk is a powerful resource, with a vast array of products, partners, and solutions. With that comes complexity. For developers in particular, the experience was extremely fragmented with many different access points, primarily due to legacy and acquisitions. There was also no overview or single reference for the vast number of available APIs. This created a scenario that was tedious and confusing for internal managers to navigate, let alone external developers.

We were asked to dig into this vast landscape and bring order to the chaos with the goal of creating a rational, organized portal with a unified experience that would be intuitive and easy to use. This was to become the Autodesk Developer Hub — AKA the Front Door Portal.

We started with an audit of the existing portals and interviewed users to understand what their driving needs were. Once we had a handle on the scale of the problem, we stared to build the structure that would bring it all together. Working through the UI/UX, our team was able to unify the experience, allowing all Autodesk developers to easily view and search available APIs as well as enabling suggestions for future needs.

Developers are a demanding audience. And to ensure our approach was viable, we did extensive user testing to verify that the Front Door Portal was indeed easy to navigate, quick to use and intuitive. We needed to confirm that users knew how to navigate the filters to find what they were looking for and easily submit feedback when they searched for something that didn’t yet exist.

With the front end established, we then built out the back end, in collaboration with internal teams, within their existing dev environment and pipeline. Autodesk has very specific guidelines around coding, compliance, and security and we were able to navigate all those complexities to deliver a fully functional hub that met all necessary requirements.

Since the launch, the feedback has been immensely positive and Autodesk has seen a marked increase in traffic compared to the previous structure.