Scheduled Update. Designing Automated Product Updates in Autodesk Access
~10 million people had Autodesk Access installed, but only 28,900 used it, and most never updated until something broke. By surfacing admin-scheduled updates directly inside the app, I helped grow active users +251% and cut outdated-version usage past its year-over-year target across every product.
Autodesk Access is a desktop app for managing software updates. IT admins schedule when updates install; end users see them happen automatically.
My role: I owned the end-user experience, how users were informed, prepared for, and experienced scheduled updates. A partner designer handled the admin side.
Key flows I designed:
- Multiple policies: when admins set different update times for different products, how does the UI show all of them clearly?
- Notification model: when and how to surface alerts without causing fatigue
- Ordering rules: how statuses and toast notifications stack and prioritise
End users get Access from:
- Direct download from autodesk.com/products/autodesk-access/overview
- Automatic install with any new 2022-or-later product installation
- Progressive self-update rollout: percentage-based progressive rollout via automatic updater
- SCCM/Intune deployments: IT admins can deploy silently using AdAccess-Installer
The goal: end users often had no visibility into updates, leading to confusion and disruption. The objective was to bridge that gap by surfacing admin-scheduled updates directly to end users, so they no longer had to seek out updates manually and could stay current on the latest features and security improvements.
UX challenge: Autodesk Access needed to handle multiple product updates across multiple timings, while keeping the UI clear enough for end users to understand what was happening and avoiding OS notification fatigue when updates stacked up.
Autodesk Access serves two primary user types:
- Individual users who manage their own product updates independently
- Users whose product updates are managed by an IT admin on their behalf
For this project, the focus is on user type 2. We'll call our persona Javier - a managed end user whose update schedule is controlled by his organization's admin.
Before starting the project, we wanted to understand how users experience friction in the absence of scheduled updates, how they'd expect scheduled updates to behave, and whether Autodesk Access is a destination they actually use.
To ground the design in real behavior, we ran guerrilla Zoom interviews with 7 participants across different industries. Six key findings shaped everything that followed.
Users only update when something breaks.
Most end users do not proactively update. They rely on IT to tell them when to act.
Users did not know if they needed an update.
Larger firms relied on IT emails or group chats for updates. Solo users went directly to the Autodesk Account portal website.
Access had a discoverability problem.
Several participants had never heard of Autodesk Access, and saw no reason to use it since updates already surface in-product.
Users wanted release notes.
Participants consistently asked to know what was changing and whether it would affect their files, OS or hardware.
Regular weekly updates felt too frequent.
Scheduling preferences ranged from monthly to quarterly. Nearly everyone wanted a snooze or override option.
Silent background updates were widely welcomed.
6 of 7 participants were open to silent scheduled background updates.
Three of Javier's needs shaped specific decisions:
- He only updates when something breaks (Finding 1 & 6) → so I designed silent background upgrades.
- He wants control when an update is inconvenient (Finding 5) → so I designed the postponement interaction rather than forcing an immediate update.
- He needs to know what's changing (Finding 4) → so I surfaced a quick summary of the release notes in-app instead of forcing him to click out to a website to find them.
To align user and business needs, I created a high-level cross-channel flow map visualizing how native OS notifications, the system-tray indicator and the Autodesk Access application coordinate across the full update experience.
The map spans seven phases: Start, Onboarding, Setup and Browse, New Updates, Install Updates, Updates Installed, and Update History.
This artifact aligned product, engineering and design, ensuring all three notification layers were accounted for before any screen design began.
The original design used date tabs to group scheduled updates. It worked when there was a single policy, but once multiple policies with different dates and times existed, the tab structure could bury a missed update inside a tab the user might never see. Hence, I tested two directions, learned from the failures, and converged on a third.
I ran this as task-completion testing: giving participants a series of tasks to complete, then capturing both their score and any behavioral patterns along the way. It's one of my favorite research methods to run, since it gives me quantitative scores and qualitative patterns in one pass.
Date tabs grouped by schedule (Nov 12 / Jan 12), with updates nested by install time inside each tab.
Removing the tab structure, and all install time and date in one view. User can filter by missed update.
5 / 20 Thought the "Unscheduled" header was part of missed updates, unaware it was a separate group from Scheduled update.
7 / 20 Could see an update was missed, but couldn't tell why or when it had been missed.
14 / 20 Confused by the "Update now" banner button, unsure if it updated everything or just missed items.
Design carried over from Round 1.
Unscheduled and Scheduled toggle next to each other, rather than separated. Allow users to Update all missed and available updates.
Findings from Round 1 shaped Variant C: drop the date tabs entirely, group updates by install time in one continuous list, and merge the Scheduled and Unscheduled in a toggle tab. I then tested Variant B with Variant C.
C was the clear winner: every missed update was visible without hunting through tabs. Backend data also showed that admins mostly schedule one or two policies, having more than two is rare, so listing everything in one continuous view wouldn't cause a navigation problem at scale.
A second push toward C: engineering flagged that the missed-update banner couldn't support its own call-to-action button. This is a technical constraint, not a preference. That made the banner redundant on its own terms, reinforcing C as the right direction from both the usability data and the build.
Notifications that confirm without interrupting. The challenge was guaranteeing users saw their update reminders without stacking alerts that train people to ignore them. We ran research to understand this further.
Research surfaced a "golden hour", an optimal window when a reminder is most likely to be noticed, validated through a survey. When multiple updates are scheduled on the same day, they collapse into a single reminder, sent before the earliest update begins. Success notifications auto-dismiss after five seconds: enough time to register, without user intervention.
The Scheduled Updates feature shipped in January 2026, giving end users the ability to receive updates scheduled by their IT admin directly through the Autodesk Access application.
Overview of Scheduled updates in Autodesk Access
The first thing managed users see.
Live progress without a blocking modal. Users can see what's happening.
When multiple products have different statuses. The list needs clear sorting logic so the most urgent item always surfaces first.
An example of how toast notifications were documented for development so no ambiguity on timing, behaviour, and dismissal rules.
Mapping every OS notification state - reminder, scheduled day, postponement and how they combine when multiple fire in the same day. This ensures no edge case goes undesigned.
By surfacing admin-scheduled updates directly to end users, the team met and exceeded its 50% year-over-year reduction target for non-latest version usage, bringing AutoCAD, Revit, and Inventor users below the goal across every product.
From 28,900 to 101,600 active users.
Scheduled-update adoption.
CES score for the update experience.
What was hard
Breaking the work into thin slices meant some edge cases and scenarios weren't accounted for until a later phase and we had to revisit and redo parts of the design as a result.
What I'd do next
Start with a clearer vision of the end product. Parts of Autodesk Access had been touched by other designers before I joined, so I built my understanding from what was already created, which meant some assumptions were inherited rather than intentional. Starting from a shared north-star would have reduced the back-and-forth and made the thin-slice sequencing cleaner.