AMAZON WEB SERVICES
CLOUDSCAPE DESIGN SYSTEM
As part of a 2-person UX team, I led end-to-end design and UX strategy for this 12-month project—from early discovery through V1 launch. I partnered closely with research, product, and engineering, and drove alignment through cross-functional reviews and executive presentations.
early vision work
I started at AWS designing core UI elements, but quickly saw that a visual library wasn’t enough. With 200+ siloed service teams, users faced inconsistent, confusing console experiences. I took the initiative to audit key workflows—like resource creation—to expose and map the fragmentation.
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 example shows a redesigned quickstart guide for building a web app in under 5 minutes using the new design system.
Previously, users had to navigate 4–5 disjointed services (like EC2, S3, and RDS), making ~90 clicks to complete even simple tasks. With the redesign, modular components from each team were integrated into a unified flow—reducing complexity and bringing the process down to just 4 clicks. Novice users got a seamless experience, while power users retained full control through advanced settings.
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
