Have You Tried (HYT) is a monthly article series highlighting learning content for AutoCAD. Our goal was to increase customer engagement by expanding beyond in-product messaging through email and paid social. I designed the HYT icon to create a brand presence and drive consistency across our multi-channel campaign. Our efforts drove an average of 24% lift in unique traffic and 6.1K unique referrals over the duration of each monthly campaign.
In order to reinforce HYT as a trusted and valuable learning resource, I designed a simple icon that could be carried through across multiple channels. I liked the lightbulb imagery and wanted to leverage that with the icon. Here's a few options that I tried out, before getting to the final design.
The first take was too clunky and the pattern didn’t translate well within the in-product notification.
I wanted to try another version that the AutoCAD cursor, but our product stakeholders preferred the lightbulb icon.
This ended up being the clear favorite, but we decided to remove the speech bubble to further simplify.
Final icon design
We reviewed the campaign performance each month and worked to optimize the program to improve our results. I swapped out imagery of people with more detailed product screens and replaced static images with animated gifs as those performed better based on A/B testing
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Due to the program’s success, Have You Tried expanded to 6 additional languages with localized emails converting >2x more compared with English.