Announcing the redesign of the Autodesk forums

[aaron.tw]

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Over the years, various Autodesk teams have worked with the Community to get feedback about our forums. Although we enjoy hearing where we succeeded, it’s far more useful to understand where we didn’t. We recognize that the Autodesk forums are a valuable resource for millions of people. So, we listened to what you said and are redesigning the Autodesk forums to address some main concerns.

At the highest level, the Autodesk forum redesign will:

• Make the user experience consistent for all our members, across any device—desktop, laptop, phone, and tablet
• Simplify the look and feel to improve site performance
• Allow for quick back-and-forth navigation to other support resources, such as the Autodesk Knowledge Network
• Standardize features and functionality

If you have questions about this announcement or about the forums in general, please post to the Community Feedback forum.

[aaron.tw]

The Autodesk forums will remain accessible through forums.autodesk.com, any search engine, and any bookmarks you previously set. None of the changes affect how you reach the forums.

This post highlights a few improvements that provide a simplified and streamlined Support experience.

Standardized header

You may have noticed that, as a destination, the forums seemed to be an isolated island rather than an interconnected ecosystem. We got a lot of feedback that the forums should offer a gateway to many resources: “Why can’t I navigate to Autodesk.com from the forums?” “It’s difficult to find other resources about the product that I’m interested in.” We listened to this feedback, and will be launching a new global header for our forums. Through this new experience, you can:

• Navigate to Autodesk.com, Autodesk Knowledge Network, and other Autodesk web pages.
• Access your account and change your language preference.
• Enjoy a robust search experience. The search results will include not only forum posts but also the extensive content in Autodesk Knowledge Network.

 

Support resource integration

As you may have read in the initial post describing the community redesign, we are integrating our community forums with other support resources, such as Autodesk Knowledge Network. This redesign includes new navigational headers in the community forums.

For instance, when you are on the AutoCAD forum, you see the following:

This navigational experience allows streamlined and direct access to other support resources. In this case, from the AutoCAD forum, you can directly access Autodesk Knowledge Network and all its resources. The same experience is available for all products that have forums.

The next announcement will include more detailed screenshots of the actual look and feel of the new experience. Please be on the lookout for that announcement soon.

[aaron.tw]

The redesign of the forums introduces new features that improve your experience when you ask, answer, and view questions in the community. Here is a summary of some of the most exciting changes:

Kudos -> Likes

If you’ve engaged with the Autodesk forums before, you know what it means to give kudos to a post. However, the thousands of new users who join our forums every month may not be familiar with the term kudos.

We’re moving to the term like, which is well known across online platforms and provides a simple and familiar way for people to engage with any post. This change makes it easier to show appreciation for people who participate in the community.

Dashboard

Everyone now has a personal dashboard page that reflects their account activity. The centralized dashboard tracks your activity across all boards. It shows posts, ideas, recently visited boards, and unresolved posts that you might be able to answer.

 

Product forum pages

Every product category or individual product forum is a gateway to a larger content ecosystem. You can access not only the forums and community content but also getting started tutorials, product help and support, downloads, and troubleshooting guides available on Autodesk Knowledge Network.

Trending Topics

What’s on people’s minds? What are the hot topics in a community? Each product forum now features a Trending Topics section that displays the most active posts in that community.

Our goal is to deliver a more integrated, more accessible, and faster experience to our community. If you have feedback or encounter issues, please create a post on our Community Feedback board. We look forward to seeing you on the new forums!

[aaron.tw]

We're very excited to announce the new forums will be live on Monday April 9!

In order to complete the redesign, the forums will go offline at 1 p.m. on Friday, April 6, and may remain down until 9 a.m. on Monday, April 9 (Pacific time). We will work hard during the transition to bring the forums back online as soon as possible. We apologize for this inconvenience.

To report issues or give feedback to community team, please post on the Community Feedback forum.