Improving Autodesk in Education

[Chris Marra]

Hey everyone,

For a senior consulting project at my college I'm working on a team with Autodesk to re-imagine the experience of using their products for education users. We're specifically focusing on their educational community [http://students.autodesk.com], but considering impact elsewhere. Right now we're exploring everything as a possibility for the project because our focus is on future designs rather than implementation, so we want to get a really good understanding of what our potential users want, think about the existing experience, and how they approach learning/using technical design products.

Since FIRST students interact heavily with the existing site and Autodesk is a huge sponsor of the program, I wanted to get the CD perspective on things. Our team has put together this general survey for people to fill out that we can source information from, but if you leave direct feedback here it'll still be super helpful.

Some of the things we're actively thinking about and would love to get your input on (given how successful of a community CD is, after all):

• What communities are you a part of and what keeps you coming back to them?
  
• With Autodesk or other design software, how did you originally learn to use it and was it effective?
  
• When you run across a problem you can't solve, how do you find more information to unstick yourself?
  
• Do/How do you share your work? Before, during, or after a project?
• If you have used it, what are your thoughts on the existing Education Community?
  

Again, don't feel like you need to answer these questions directly - any and all thoughts you have will be tremendously useful!

Thanks,
Chris Marra