Advocating Data Exchange
Context
As one of the beta products from Autodesk Platform Services, Data Exchange needs to expand its customer base as it evolves. User experience is vital for improving customer engagement, retention, and overall product growth. As a designer, I’ve been actively evangelizing the products:
- Gather voice of customer for Data Exchange by supporting vanguard programs customers and named accounts
- Talk at industry conferences
- Produce demo videos; post tips and tricks at user forums
- Collaborate with content designers to create product help documents.
- Collaborate with other developers and new product managers to produce learning materials
- Customer support for Data Exchange via emails, user forums, and webinars
- Prerelease bug testing and validation, and continuous dog feeding
- Help promote data driven decision culture
Examples of my articles/posts
- Promote new products and features: Data Exchange - Dynamo Connector Beta - Revit - Dynamo
- Write Help documents: Data Exchange Help | Power Automate Connector - Data Exchanges through Excel | Autodesk
- Post tips and tricks for using the product:
- Demo video: Data Exchange SDK 3.3.1 Beta Hello World
Challenges
- The one-stop-shop vision may conflict with the developer-only persona.
- Communication and coordination with different stakeholders, including dev portal documentation team, developer advocate team, product data technical writing team, engineering teams and product management.
- Complexity: Consisting both APIs and SDK, and many client products (“connectors”)
- Keeping products and docs in sync.
- Feedback loop is long: DAS, training and conferencing.
- Decides what problems to solve as a service that is part of a bigger platform.
- Onboarding (day 0) has always been a big pain point.
Lessons Learned
- Prototyping using our own products is essential to build empathy and align with the customers.
- Keep it simple.
James Dyson, the inventor of the dual cyclone vacuum cleaner that bears his name, discusses one of its design features—the transparent plastic cylinder within which the rubbish collects—in his autobiography:
A journalist who came to interview me once asked, ‘The area where the dirt collects is transparent, thus parading all our detritus on the outside and turning the classic design inside out. Is this some post-modernist nod to the architectural style pioneered by Richard Rodgers at the Pompidou Centre, where the air-conditioning and escalators, the very guts, are made into a self-referential design feature?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘It’s so you can see when it’s full.’
(From "Against the Odds" by James Dyson and Giles Coren, Texere 2001)
It is my aim to keep this book as simple, straightforward, and jargon-free as possible.— From "Basic Structures" by Philip Garrison, a user-friendly classic among technical books
- Documentation is story-telling.
- Start with motivation: “Imagine the possibility of running tasks overnight on the design models updated by architects during the day.”
- Present the product from the perspective of “how to solve your problem with our tools?”, instead of “how to use our tools?”
- Speak or write as if you are talking to your customers directly:
Do Don’t Trade contractors Third-party vendors Non-Autodesk libraries Third-party libraries Beta user Beta customer BIM AEC Data Model Revit build-in parameters* Build-in parameters* *There's additional depth to this narrative. This is a simplified version of the real story.
- Use close to real-world examples instead of “placeholders” in sample code and tutorials:
Do Don’t Parameter: {EU-FireRating: “A1”} Parameter: {“Parameter 1”: “String A”} Element: Beams, Columns, Roofs Element: Sphere, cylinder
- Conclude by inviting active participation:
“Autodesk Data Exchange is under active development. Stay tuned.”
- “Force yourself to be proactive, specific, and synchronous.”
- Take the initiative to address a specific user pain point.
- Ask questions as a way of collaboration in order to propose solutions.
- Be pragmatic and have compassion and empathy for both customers and internal teams.
