Autodesk A360 - Item Experience

Viewing and navigating 2D / 3D CAD files

As a member of the Cloud Platforms User Experience team. I lead the design for A360 Item Experience; which encompasses viewing of various CAD / CAM files and promoting collaboration between mechanical designers / engineers and their stakeholders. CAD projects are complex and the designs are comprised of assemblies, parts, drawings, and much more; all linked and distributed across many files. The challenge to solve is how do our various users navigate these design files? Potentially how different or similar is it? And at which point in their workflow could they collaborate together effectively?


While at Autodesk, I worked with a strong team of designers; all contributing to different parts of A360. This product focused on cloud data storage much like you see from Dropbox or Google Drive, but what makes A360 special as a storage solution is that it connects with all native autodesk files types Fusion, Inventor (ipt and iam), Revit (rvt), and Autocad (dwg and dwfx) and can then be read and explored with 3D web viewer called LMV (Large Model Viewer).

Rapid Wireframing and Interaction Flows



To figure out this experience, I quickly had to build the trust of many Autodesk-ers, create environments for thorough discussions, and find ways to wireframe & conceptualize ideas quickly. I made a choice to be as detailed as I possible and leverage my skills of producing high-fidelity wireframes of 3D data.


The Item Overview design is intended as flexible page; serving as an entry point into A360 from other CAD products. The goal is provide a rich way of summarized the contents of a complex file(s). Users come from Fusion360, an authoring tool, where overview informs the user about the contents of a file and surfaces the meta data and conversations around the design itself. It also leads into Item Immersive (A 2D/3D viewer where users can navigate and has various deep links into parts of an assembly. This design concept placed large emphasis on the metadata of a CAD file, then presents all collaboration activity on the right panel. Both item experiences are designed to be significantly more transparent around the contents of a design file before viewing.









Design Documents

Design Process

Design immersive through conversations and collaboration

Design Brief + Timeline

Just starting Autodesk and being assigned to this large project, the best thing one can do when they begin is figure out how to tackle it. By understanding who the players are and what we'd like to build, I could then communicate it back to the group in a design brief to clearly define the project scope and maintaining a timeline of deliverables.


Research + Internal Interviews

Most of the Autodesk organization lives on tribal knowledge within each product group. Each group is fundamentally different than the next so I spent my first few weeks having 1:1 discussions with various members of each team. Many people I talked to carry a strong passion about their field with some having a past industry life in architecture or mechanical design.

UX Process and Kickoff Documents