Data Exchange UX

Developer and user experience for Autodesk Data Exchange

What’s Autodesk Data Exchange?

Autodesk Data Exchange helps share design info at every stage of a project in architecture, engineering, and construction. The offerings consist of APIs, SDKs, and connectors (i.e., client extensions).

What is my role as a DX (DevEx) and UX designer?

I work on Data Exchange DX/UX initiatives for the entire lifecycle, including:

Product design
- Provide functional requirement and detailed design for complex, mid to large-scale projects, such as computational design tools, namely Data Exchange Dynamo and Grasshopper packages.
- UI design and redesign for client applications.
- Close the gap between software specifications and implementations by creating sample apps using current APIs. These apps explore and demonstrate customer workflows, serving as a tool for the product team to engage with customers and refine requirements. This iterative process ensures solutions effectively address customer needs.
- Designed information architecture for the API and SDK documentation.

Customer advocate
- Collect the voice of customers, including developers, for Data Exchange by supporting vanguard programs and named accounts.
- Advocate products by demoing in industry conferences, producing demo videos and blog posts.
- Customer support for Data Exchange via emails, user forums, and webinars.
- Dog feed solutions and provide continuous feedback to the teams.

User research
- Plan, design and execute ad-hoc user research from validation testing to exploratory research.
- Let data tell the story. Our data comes from usage telemetry, community stats in our private beta portal, and one-on-one customer interviews.
- Capture user scenarios and workflows, transforming them into product and platform specs in collaboration with PMs and engineering leads.
- Recommendations focus on solving key pain points informed by user feedback.

Product management
- Roadmap planning and prioritization for front-end related themes and computational design.

What excites me in this job?

I find a great deal of energy and enthusiasm in the emerging realms of AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) and computational design. I studied Industrial Design in school but have spent most of my career in enterprise software GUI design; this job with Autodesk feels like the moment of connecting the dots looking backwards!

As the culture encourages individuals to take on diverse roles, I ventured into customer advocacy and product management. Customers often mistake me for either a product manager or a software engineer, as we passionately discuss products and problem-solving.

Learn and tinker the product we are building. This way, the team gain intuition on the domain, the problem at hand, and the suggested solutions. Additionally, we gather feedback from end users through the use of prototypes.

I enjoy the problem-solving process by engaging with the teams and customers to discuss the roadmap and potential solutions. I recall working with an engineer early in the morning to get product icon the correct resolution before a dot release. I also like the grassroots meetings.

In the AEC world, interoperability problems are intricate and often seemingly unique to particular contexts. But when you step back, a lot of them boil down to basics. Take, for example, helping users understand how their data connects. This applies whether you're a developer sorting out your API or custom app, or a fabricator keeping an eye on key manufacturing parameters.

Being able to directly influence the product direction and team culture, by helping progressively refine the requirements and connecting the dots between the key initiatives and end user and developer experience.

Decisive and velocity culture of the team.

Lessons learned

It’s not whether you think inside the box or outside the box. The problem lies in finding the box — identifying the real constraints.

David Thomas and Andrew Hunt

Embrace and Influence the culture
- User story first. Tell stories from the perspective of the customer. Note the key use cases, motivations, and context.
- Software engineering has become more of a social activity than it used to be.
- “Show, don’t tell.”
- Keep an open mind; avoid unilateral thinking and embrace diversity.
- Knock down the squad silos. Advocating API first mindset, end-to-end QA and one CICD pipeline.
- Approach the 'Golden Hammer dilemma' with care.

Solo designer team
- Communication with internal, cross-functional teams, consisting of 8 scrum teams, and the larger XD practice in the organization.
- Focus on planning rather than plan. Stay ahead in the game. Address customer inquiries promptly while consistently dedicating a "10%" allocation to tasks of strategic significance.
- Establish a weekly rhythm with three days focused on "delivering" and two days dedicated to "research.”
- Be pragmatic: “The key to solving puzzles is both to recognize the constraints placed on you and to recognize the degrees of freedom you do have, for in those you’ll find your solution.”

Solve the right problem at the right time
- Be patient. “Implementations and specifications have to do a delicate dance together.”
- Solve the right problem at the right time. Communicate the right ideas at the right time. Sometimes, we delegate to the platform if it’s a platform-wide problem.
- Reframe the question to reveal shared understanding.
- Influence the decision making by presenting facts and voice of the customers.

How UX design steers product development

Our job is to help people understand what they want. In fact, that’s probably our most valuable attribute.

David Thomas and Andrew Hunt

Much has been said above. Here are some concrete bullet points on how a small design team embedded in a software development process can impact the product:

As a representative of the Data Exchange team, I supported a named account off-site and on-site at Accelerator Chicago, uncovering key use cases that informed the SDK's long term roadmaps.