First CAD on cloud on market with the message of "Design fast, work anywhere, and share with anyone"

Project Brief

Cloud platform is a backbone of the Autodesk's first CAD on cloud, called Fusion 360. The product targets industrial designers, manufacturing engineers, and small shop CAM machinist.

Fusion includes suite of applications but runs like a single application thanks to this cloud platform. The applications include modeling, simulation, CAM, documentation, and presentation. Its functionality has been increasing to serve variety of design applications and design stages.

he platform offers common user interfaces, navigation commands, selection paradigm, and underlying data model that will be shared across multiple applications. It goes beyond 'just a CAD' application by integrating with data management and collaboration services, leveraging cloud storage and cloud computation.

This is a highly complex, on-going project with multiple teams involved. I will go over things that are already revealed through the public and official channel.

My Contributions

Overall

  • Build a vision of design collaboration - how our users will collaborate and evolve design using the cloud-based design software
  • Guide UX team to deliver the vision
  • Platform UX leadership to deliver coherent in-tool experience

Cloud Services

  • Data upload and translation process
  • Activity feed for design collaboration
  • Notification and alerts system
  • Version management

In-Tool Experience

  • Align platform and client UX perspectives
  • Negotiate prioritization of platform UI requirements coming from various client applications
  • Define and prototype behavior of common commands
  • Define and prototype behavior of palette system (click here for mockup example used for design communication with remote development team)

Analytics

  • Plan usage tracking and socialize capabilities of analytics among clients UX

Challenges

  • Connect various cloud services to provide seamless experience
  • Strive for value proposition offered by data on cloud
  • Designing UI platform that serves very different application needs

Skills

  • Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Fireworks, Flash, Axure, Balsamiq, Usability studies, resarch