Designing the User Experience at Autodesk

Fostering Innovation in China: Autodesk's Support to the User Experience Design Community

by Itamar Medeiros on April 24, 2009

At Autodesk, we believe the power of innovative design serves to positively impact the economy, the environment, and society as a whole. We drive awareness and increase adoption of sustainable design principles not only by delivering great solutions to our customers, but also by fostering innovation within the User Experience Design community by sponsoring several design conferences in the past few years through the world, like TED, UPA’s UserFriendly 2007,  ACM’s SIGCHI, and both IxDA’s Interactions ’08 and Interactions ’09, to name a few.

In China, Autodesk is raising the awareness about User Experience Design, both through university collaborations with our Research and Development Center in Shanghai – the biggest R&D center among multinational firms in the country – and through sponsorship to local design organizations. One of these organizations is IxDA.

The local chapter of IxDA in Shanghai has hosted a number of activities, including software demos, seminars, best practices sharing sessions, and so on. Most recently, a round-table discussion was held on the topic of Innovation: from Design Vision to Market. The moderators included Mark Rolston (Chief Creative Officer of frog design ), Baili Liu (Project Manager for HFI),  and Douglas Wang (User Experience Design Manager for Autodesk).

 
Different perspectives Western and Chinese people have of innovation
From Left to Right: Mark Rolston (frogdesign), Douglas Wang (Autodesk), Baili Liu (HFI)

With over 50 designers attending, the round-table covered many interesting aspects of the interaction design practice, ranging from “What is Chinese design?”  to “What is innovation?” Here are a few take away points:

Thoughts on Innovation

1. Innovations are not necessarily all about new inventions, but more about finding beneficial and effective applications and enabling a larger population of people to take advantage of something more simply and more conveniently than they have in the past.
2. Innovation is to see what everybody has seen and think what nobody has thought.
3. Innovation in the West: innovate to create a better future.
4. Innovation in China: innovate to gain an equilibrium between people and nature.
5. Culture defines the behaviors facilitated by innovations.
6. The purpose of Design is to create and manage a good experience of a tool and deliver to the users gracefully.

Social Impact of Good Innovation and Design

1. Good designs build good confidence for the people we are designing for.
2. When things are made easy to use, creative, and cultural appropriate, people become self-powered on the tools around and receive great productivity on doing things.
3. With all the technology advances and possibilities, designers are responsible to realize the dreams that could never before be realized.

Challenges and Opportunities for Designers

1.   Designers should equip themselves with broad domain knowledge:

• in technology trends,
• fashion,
• social studies,
• psychology
• and especially in cultures.

2.  Designers should also have deep understanding of a specific subject; for example, the primary users’ behavior, history, and other awareness.

3.  Designers need to be creative in proving the return of investment to the business decision makers as an important factor to bring the strategy to execution.

Autodesk will continue to support the interaction design community in China. So stay tuned for future events!

Autodesk Sponsors CHI 2009

by Lynn Miller on April 1, 2009

I used to think that there was nothing better than going to a conference and sharing my discoveries with my peers while gaining new insights from them. But there is! Being in a company that sponsors the conference!

I am happy to say that Autodesk is once again demonstrating its commitment to the field of HCI by becoming a Champion Sponsor of CHI 2009. We are proud to help fund this important event and hope that we get to meet many new people, along with old friends, at our booth.

In case you haven’t seen our booth, it looks like this before the crowds descend on it.

We’ve got six people presenting this year (see Come See Us at CHI) who will be at the booth to talk to people about their presentations, what working for Autodesk is like, and to engage in lively discussions about the state of user interface design.

We’re also having a raffle at our booth! We’re giving away two copies of popular Autodesk software like Mudbox, Maya, or Inventor. You can sign up for the raffle by dropping your business card into the bowl at our booth.  The raffle will be held on April 9th, and you don’t need to be present to win.

We’d love to see you there!

Come See Us at SIGCHI 2009

by Lynn Miller on March 11, 2009

We at Autodesk are pleased to be having our largest presence ever at SIGCHI in 2009.  Not only are we a Champion Sponsor (more on that at a later date), but we have six people presenting this year on a variety of topics.

Lillian Smith and Greg Demchak are showing Project Chicago: Green Research in the Video Showcase on Tuesday, from 6:30 to 8:00pm.  Their video showcases a highly graphic, interactive technology concept for evaluating water and energy reduction, indoor environmental quality, and carbon footprint impacts and giving designers an immediate sense of the results of different building designs. This proposed sustainability dashboard concept is demonstrated on a 6’x3’ touch screen to explore its potential use as a collaborative tool. The dashboard is presented by Autodesk as a technology concept; it is not a commercially available product.

Lynn Miller and Desiree Sy are holding an Agile User Experience SIG on Wednesday from 9 to 10:30am. The goal of this SIG is to draw upon the shared experience of UX practitioners to uncover the best practices for agile user-centered design which facilitate optimal product development.

Lira Nikolovska, Greg Demchak and Matt Jezyk are presenting two papers as part of Designing for Discovery on Wednesday from 4:30 to 6:00pm.  The first paper, Simplified User Interfaces for Design and User Testing of Architecture Software Applications, describes the value of creating simplified user interfaces for use in early conceptual design phases. By simplifying the interface, the team was able to solicit specific feedback about new tools without the overhead or pre-conceptions associated with using an existing software platform. As a result, the team was able to iterate rapidly on specific problems. The second paper, Understanding User Needs for Conceptual Design Phases of Architecture Projects, describes design research methods used to understand user needs, identify user requirements and create new conceptual design workflows for an existing architectural software application.

And last but not least, Autodesk employee Chauncey Wilson is a member of the organizing committee for the User Experience and Usability community.

We hope to meet you at SIGCHI this year!

Lynn