Architectural Giant Bets Big On Content, Collects Numerous Awards

In our first conversations with the team at Autodesk, it was clear the focus of the project would be centered around increasing user engagement. The term ‘engagement’ is elastic, but all the potential data points revolve around the user investing time to interact with your brand.

Producing high-quality content is the most important factor when aiming to increase engagement. The other side of executing this goal involved site load time, design and building tools that optimize user experience. Let's explore.

As we began our Discovery Phase, Autodesk’s internal team was consistently producing strong content, introducing new authors, diversifying future material and creating unique interaction tools — all of which laid the foundation for our strategy moving forward. It was time to build.

Our custom sidebar facilitates the majority of engagement behaviors — all in one place. One-click social sign-on allows the user to view recommended and saved articles, comment in the thread, and subscribe to Autodesk’s newsletter.

This front-end tool feeds insights into a backend panel administrators use to interpret previous activity and predict future behavior. Users can track article progress while enjoying unique features on every device.

Our custom dashboard emphasizes insights over data. Rather than average page time, we measure ‘engagement’ by calculating predicted read time based on character count and on-page user activity. We approached seven other key data points in similar fashion to facilitate direction rather than guesswork.

We paired backend functionality with frontend features. Anticipated read times, saving material for later and viewing recommended articles provide Autodesk’s followers with a unique experience — on every device. An innovative, scalable server configuration ensures performance in the face of attack and heavy user load.

In the first 60 days, sessions, new users and organic traffic all doubled. Users chose to continue reading 500% more and conversions dramatically increased. More important, Autodesk now measures persona reading preferences, can identify the most engaging author, and understands where they need to invest resources to continue growing.