Autodesk Platform Services

A Blueprinting Project

Client

Autodesk Platform Services (formerly Forge) is a development platform that has a set of web service APIs to create your own cloud-powered applications.

Background

After a re-org, the company put a new group of employees in charge of overseeing content related to Autodesk Forge.

As a contractor team of two, my role was to audit who, when, where, why, and how content is created and maintained. We completed:

  1. Generative research through 15 internal interviews

  2. A service blueprint/journey map hybrid

  3. Identified gaps, opportunities, points of confusion, and triggers for content updates.

Problem

The Forge team was overwhelmed, having inherited an organically-grown web of content as a result of a re-org, and needed to figure out what to do with it.

Solution

The deliverables I produced helped inform what their new 'content kingdom' looked like and how to better serve their users: developers and engineering managers.

As a result, the mass of content was no longer overwhelming for the team. They were able to start identifying and prioritizing work for their roadmap using the opportunities and gaps we identified.

Timeline

2 months

Role

  • Researcher

  • Service Designer

Team

2 Researchers (including me)

3 Stakeholders from Autodesk:

  • Experience Design Lead

  • Product Manager

  • Development Lead

Tools

  • Figma

  • Mural

  • Google Docs/Sheets

  • Microsoft Teams

My Process
Autodesk Platform Services (formerly Forge)

Example of me and the other researcher taking notes during interviews.

Interviews

Who?

15 internal employees

Starting with our direct stakeholders, we needed to understand what they knew about the content they inherited, and what their ultimate goals were.

Then we branched out to all other groups known to be responsible for the content

Sample Questions
Autodesk Platform Services (formerly Forge)

We organized and distilled our notes in an organized fashion

Synthesis

Document

The interviews yielded much information we couldn't all cram into the service design map. We wanted to make all of this available to our stakeholders when they wanted to look up more information about the resulting insights

Autodesk Platform Services (formerly Forge)

Transposed notes into a more map-able format

Spreadsheet

To get from paragraphs to a map, we created a middle-ground data repository in the form of a spreadsheet. This would make it much easier to chunk data in small phrases.

Mapping

Journey Phases

Our stakeholders identified three distinct phases an end user passed through. The type of content they were likely to consume changed depending on which phase they were in.

  1. Discover

  2. Explore/Evaluate/Consider

  3. Try

We mapped the sites/system that contained relevant content, as well as the content types themselves to this established journey.

Autodesk Platform Services (formerly Forge)

Journey Phases

Autodesk Platform Services (formerly Forge)

Map Key

Key

We specified mapped items with

  1. The team(s) responsible for the content or site/system,

  2. If we thought it was a gap, optimizable, or known point of confusion

  3. Who or what triggered the content creation or update

Final Map
Autodesk Platform Services (formerly Forge)

Content decription, management, any policy around it, and oversight activities were rows identified by colors. The client later added the red color on boxes they re-identified as gaps they wanted to tackle.

Handoff
Autodesk Platform Services (formerly Forge)

Video call with stakeholders

During this meeting, we could tell that the team was excited to poke through this map, and base their roadmap on the recommendations, opportunities and gaps we identified.

Learnings

At the beginning of the project, it was easy to feel overwhelmed, like the clients did.

However, once broken into pieces and completing the research, I felt much more comfortable with breaking the information apart and creating the visual artifact. Making up our own hybrid of the blueprint and journey map that worked for the information at hand crushed the preconception that you can't mix methods to get a meaningful outcome.

This was also the first time I had done a blueprint like this outside of make-up scenarios, which allowed me to grow my skills in research and synthesis.

Thank you!