Design and Research
Avid Technology
2022 - 2025
I conducted hundreds of research studies and designed for every major product line and web property.
Support Ticket Reduction
When I took ownership of the Avid.com Support experience, the site was generating 60–70K support tickets a month, with many repeat, easily-solvable issues slipping past self-service.
I led a cross-functional initiative to rethink the information architecture, surface critical workflows, and rebuild key knowledge resources based on search data, analytics, and stakeholder interviews.
Problem: 60-70,000 support tickets a month, many the same basic problems over and over.
Goal: Support tasked to reduce ticket volume by 50% as a critical OKR. They approached my team to help solve that dilemma.
- 32% Reduction in Support Tickets
- 56% Increase in Time on Site
- Marginal reduction in chat bot usage
Tiahna McDowell, CCXP, PMP
Director, Customer Success
I had the incredible opportunity to work closely with Anthony at Avid. With over 25 years of experience, Anthony's ability to build and lead UX and Product teams is truly remarkable.
During our time together, Anthony's leadership was pivotal.
Better Onboarding = Better Retention
My team’s user research consistently revealed one of Avid Pro Tools’ biggest issues was the onboarding. It’s a complex piece of software that isn’t easily figured out just by clicking around.
I led an initiative to prototype in-app tutorials alongside a team member from the Learning division and a single enterprising developer. We had the support of the head of that product. My work included the design of the tutorial system and UI, writing tutorial content and curriculum, and conducting research to both validate the design and measure the results.
The results were dramatic: a 50% drop in churn in Week 1 for those users who completed the initial Welcome tutorial.
With that success I lobbied heavily to utilize Soundflow, an automation tool that worked on MacOS only, but was popular with Pro Tools users. I’d been introduced to it by the head of that product and saw the potential.
After some time Soundflow is embedded into Pro Tools. I designed for a user-driven marketplace, and Soundflow had one already which was convenient. Overall a big success, and a great chance for me to show my ability to lead projects from a business and workflow perspective.
User Research in Practice
I created a strategic research system to synthesize feedback from Avid’s hundreds of thousands of users across sales calls, voice of customer, support logs, interviews, and surveys (general, NPS, and CSAT).
Our system was reviewed by representatives from Airtable and UserTesting.com, who stated it was the most sophisticated Insight scoring method they’d come across with their customers.
- Tied Conversion, Churn, and ARR to expressed user needs mathematically.
- Partnered with Product to give roadmap accurate ROI estimates based on real user needs and metrics.
- This process is codified in https://univrs.ai/
We also conducted Discovery and Evaluative research across all major product lines, including daily user interviews, surveys, contextual inquiries, usability studies, tree testing, and focus groups, among others. The volume of insights and value generated by me and my team was unprecedented.
