Autodesk is a software company specializing in design, engineering, and entertainment solutions. Users visit our site to purchase software, start a 30-day free trial, or access free educational licenses for the duration of their academic term.
However, these experiences—Checkout, Free Trial, and Education Access—were built by separate teams, resulting in redundant steps, inconsistent visuals, and user confusion. As the Senior Product Designer, I was tasked with consolidating these flows into a cohesive, user-friendly experience that improved conversion while validating qualified users.
Previously, there was no system in place to verify if a customer was qualified for free access to our software. Some users took advantage by creating new accounts to obtain multiple trials, while others submitted fake school information to gain educational access.
Additionally, the sign-up process was complicated, lengthy, and disjointed. The existing experience had been developed by multiple teams, each owning different parts of the process. This led to unnecessary repetition and inconsistent visual styles throughout.
My role was to analyze the different sign-up flows on our site and consolidate them into a single consistent experience. I collaborated closely with business, marketing, research, and engineering partners, ensuring stakeholder alignment and technical feasibility throughout.
From identifying feature gaps with product managers to assessing technical limitations with developers, I collaborated with various teams to understand the challenges our customers faced. Creating a competitive analysis helped to benchmark our experience against industry leaders. An common practices we observed was either requiring a phone number or credit card to prevent users from creating multiple accounts.
Our data analytics team observed significant user drop-offs early in the sign-up flow, with many users redirecting themselves to other sign-up flows. We hypothesized that these users were confused by the terminology of "free trial" versus "education access." Working with the research team, we conducted A/B tests to introduce an off-ramp link in both sign-up experiences, guiding users to the appropriate path. From customer surveys and interviews, we learned that much of the frustration stemmed from how long it took to complete the sign-up process.
After completing our discovery phase, we organized the findings through a workshop with stakeholders to prioritize the most critical issues and define how we would address them. Using a priority matrix, we aligned on which components would deliver the most impact relative to the effort required to implement them.
Starting with low-fidelity wireframes, I removed optional and redundant fields to reduce friction. Any data request that couldn’t be justified was eliminated. To verify education eligibility, we worked with a third-party vendor (SheerID) to integrate their API into our sign-up process. By using the information provided by users, we could cross-check SheerIDs comprehensive database to confirm if the student or teacher was currently enrolled in an educational institution.
Testing began early, combining qualitative usability sessions with quantitative A/B experiments.
Key Findings:
Page-by-page flow preferred: Users favored a step-by-step experience with a clear progress indicator over the accordion layout, saying it felt more guided and easier to complete.
Dual-column layout performed best: Displaying contextual information on the right helped users understand what was coming next, increasing confidence and reducing hesitation.
Phone verification over credit card: For free trials, users were more comfortable providing a phone number than credit card details. Transparency about how the data would be used helped address privacy concerns.
The final design delivered a simplified, cohesive sign-up flow across Checkout, Trial, and Education Access. A dual-column layout showed form fields on the left and contextual information on the right, helping users stay oriented.
Outcomes:
Reduced steps from 8 → 4
50% fewer fields than before
Conversion rate up 13%
Support cases down 8%
Marketing teams gained more qualified leads
