Autodesk Design Academy

An agile platform streamlining use, built for collaboration and shaping minds

Autodesk Academy cs teaser

Client

Challenge

Impact

Client

Providing Autodesk full control and capabilities

Eliminate content user limitations and bottlenecks

Empowering the Design Academy team to have ownership of their site content was one of the project’s top goals. The Design Academy site was originally built so that pages followed a rigid layout. This meant that a development team needed to help with any content modifications beyond making changes to text, which limited the efficiency and capabilities of their content teams.

Challenge

A Platform Providing Optimized Experiences For Both Client Teams and Those They Serve

Needs

Technical Solutions

To fix the problem of content bottlenecks and user limitations caused by a rigid layout structure, FFW worked with Autodesk Design Academy to develop a flexible page builder. The new solution allows the Design Academy team to create and customize pages without needing technical help, and is being used to rebuild every page designed with the old system.

A scalable file management system, built for speed and efficiency

Autodesk Design Academy is a learning platform where all 100,000 users can upload content. But even with a cleaned-up back end, the system couldn't scale as needed when it came to managing files. So the Design Academy team and FFW migrated the Design Academy site onto a more flexible solution, and built a better way of storing large files.

To make sure that the site wasn't slowed down by content uploads and downloads, FFW built an abstracted file system. The site and the files are stored separately on the hosting server, but work together to provide a single, seamless experience.

Integrating disparate platforms for efficiency and resource savings

Autodesk's main blog site, Redshift, is well-known globally, and runs on Wordpress. The Autodesk Design Academy Team wanted the ability to use Redshift's content for educational purposes, so FFW built a Wordpress-Drupal importer. It allows the Design Academy site to pull content from the Redshift site, and display that content on the Design Academy site. This allows the content team to easily reuse popular design content to support their educational goals.

Measuring the impact of their service

To help the Autodesk Design Academy team evaluate whether they were achieving their KPIs, the FFW team built out an internal user analytics system. It provides performance data around activities on the site, and can generate reports on three million records at a time.

Users can compile advanced data on user behavior in visually-appealing reports, which are now used by many different Autodesk Education programs worldwide to measure various initiatives.

Impact

An immediate impact on both sides of the screen

x
125
decrease in errors
40
%
more efficient servers
183
%
faster page load

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