early vision work
I started at AWS working on the basics—buttons, input fields, the core UI patterns. But it quickly became clear that a visual pattern library wasn’t enough. Every service team was still building their own experiences, which led to over 200 inconsistent consoles. It hurt usability, trust, and ultimately retention—especially for new users.
I took the initiative to audit the full experience across ser
V1 of the new system
Every service resource became a widget card with basic configuration steps in the main card and advanced configuration in an expandable section. This allowed for the inter-weaving of services towards a solution without a user needing to create a mental model for all 200+ services.
This shows an example of a quickstart guide to creating a web app within 5 minutes using the new design system.
Before the redesign, there was no design system so every service team designed their own interface and user flows. This was a problem for end users, because to complete simple cloud tasks such as making a web app, requires the user to use multiple services. In this case, a user would go to EC2 to create an instance (a virtual server), S3 to create storage for images and code, RDS or another database service to create the data storage, CloudFront to create a CDN for your content across the world, and potentially a host of other services depending on the type of web app. For a basic web app, it required a user to go through 90 clicks to complete all the actions and encounter 4-5 disjointed user experiences.
For example, with the web app, each team built a modular component for creating the needed resource and a user then could stack those modules into a single flow. Going from 90 clicks, to 4 clicks to create a web app. A novice user didn’t need to navigate or even know that the different resources were coming from different engineering teams. A power user could dive into the advanced configuration options inside the flow or even opening the service and going into the details there.
testing out our conceptual work
The first console we used as a test case was AWS Autoscaling. This provided us with a create flow, beginner and advanced user configuration options, using resources from other consoles in a user's flow, and the ability to update and manage your autoscaled instances. We were able to test out our widget experience with real users. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-auto-scaling-unified-scaling-for-your-cloud-applications/
Some of the early user research feedback we got was that users needed to go off to help docs too much when going through a multi-API wizard. This prompted me to work closely with the technical writing team to provide inline help directly related to individual inputs and decision points.
Results
Now all 200+ service consoles are using the design system to build and deploy their interfaces. This not only greatly speeds up the development cycle for internal teams, but it creates a unified and intuitive interface for our end customers.
The new console home was also rolled out as part of this initiative.
You can see how many quickstarts are available for the common cloud computing solutions (such as Launch a virtual machine).
customer reactions
