A global navigation system

The context

When I joined, marketing, support, and user communities each lived on a separate publishing platform. Each had its own header, and Autodesk sold in more than 150 countries.

The navigation lead, whose actual title was Navigation Czar, sat next to me. We shaped the labels together, and the architecture was the lead’s call.

Act 1:It started with a Me menu

The first piece was a seemingly simple Me menu, one place for your account and profile wherever you were on the site. It took close to a year.

Most of that year went into deciding what belonged and what to call it. Early versions listed links that duplicated each other, and labels that meant the same thing in different places. Version 3 combined them, dropped what people could already reach, and showed support cases only to enterprise customers.

It became a real route. By 2023, 34% of visits to the new Payment Center started from the Me menu.

Act 2:Country and language

The selector followed. Detecting a visitor’s location from their IP address wasn’t enough. People travel, work for companies abroad, and read in a language other than their country’s.

We wrote rules for how country and language get set, kept, and changed. They covered signed-in profiles, app preferences, and URLs. Then we tested the messages against a target of a grade 7 reading level. One prompt went through drafts from grade 12 down to that target.

Act 3:Naming things

In 2021, the navigation work turned to naming. My manager at the time questioned whether the labels in our explorations had enough research behind them, and asked if we could do better. I did that nomenclature research, starting with a competitive audit of how other sites label their navigation.

What navigation labels communicate, as a share of each site’s links. A label can count in more than one group.

• Autodesk
• Adobe, Amazon, AWS, Microsoft
• Siemens

View the data

Site	Brand	Category	Commerce	Industry segment	Action verb
Autodesk	32%	68%	2%	21%	21%
Adobe	32%	46%	8%	20%	20%
Amazon	21%	68%	20%	1%	11%
AWS	36%	91%	2%	25%	24%
Microsoft	53%	38%	2%	18%	6%
Siemens	2%	97%	not counted	66%	2%

Source: competitive audit of navigation labels, 2021. Siemens had no commerce labels counted. Three other sites in the audit are left out because their rows were incomplete.

Autodesk’s labels leaned on product categories, at 68% of links. About one in five was task-based, a verb that tells people what they can do.

The audit also raised a bigger question. Was Autodesk becoming a branded house or a house of brands? Siemens labeled almost entirely by industry and category, with almost no product names. That call was never mine to make. I shared the observation with industry portfolio marketing and fellow content strategists.

Open and closed card sorts came next, then two prototypes tested across 10 sessions. Labels that seemed clear in a meeting weren’t always clear to users. “Overview” was too generic to work from every entry point. Adding the product name helped, so we recommended “Why Revit” in place of “Overview,” and “Revit Community” for the community link.

Some of these recommendations made it to the live site. Most customers used a single product, which pointed toward a product-centric site. That larger shift never happened.

Act 4:The product flyout

The product flyout brought the pieces together. It groups products by industry, with collections and top products in each, and puts tasks like starting a trial or downloading your software in plain verbs alongside.

PostScript

The Me menu, the country and language selector, and the product flyout were all still on the site in 2025. Each one was a small step, and together they gave three domains one header.

This is one story from a longer run of work at Autodesk. The Autodesk page carries the rest, and Making payment methods findable shows where the Me menu led.