I joined the Sketchbook team at the beginning of 2014. Autodesk was undergoing a company-wide migrating from perpetual-based to subscription-based licensing. It became one of the core initiatives for all product divisions. During my tenure, most of my work was built towards this migration goal.
As a heavy end-user myself, I was constantly thinking of product ideas to make our app a better drawing tool. Though my work has been focusing on design, one of my product ideas has successfully convinced our Head of Product. Sketchbook has been an amazing tool in the digital drawing world, but drawers were diverse in the medium. Through study, I found out most of our users still have the habit of drawing on paper with pens and then using a scanner to finish up in digital. Could we kill the scanner to save time and money?
The biggest initiative of the entire Autodesk that year was to transition into subscription-based licensing. As for Sketchbook, we needed to show customers why they need to migrate. After tons of iteration and testing, we decided to put everything in the onboarding banner at that time.
The final key screens below.
The conversion rate was not ideal due to being heavily front-loaded in onboarding. If I stayed, I would propose to cut down the front-loaded onboarding and distribute the rest to contextual ones.
The visual language for Sketchbook has never been changed since day one. Competitors with better aesthetics were rising. I self-initiated this project to bring more newness to our customers, in order to drive more conversions.
