Background
In 2018, AWS introduced a groundbreaking networking service designed to optimize end users’ internet performance by routing their traffic through the AWS network infrastructure. This innovative service leverages AWS’s robust network infrastructure to enhance the speed, reliability, and overall performance of internet connections for users, ensuring a seamless and optimized browsing experience. Through this initiative, AWS continues to revolutionize the landscape of networking services, providing customers with cutting-edge solutions to meet their evolving needs and demands.
Task
To ensure a successful product, it’s crucial to follow a comprehensive approach: understanding the product’s functionality, researching customer needs, conducting user research, creating personas, mapping the user journey, and collaborating with product and development teams to define the user experience for both the console and API. The goal is to design a product that is easy to learn, use, and scale. This involves deepening understanding of user preferences and challenges, aligning features with customer needs, and ensuring intuitive usability and scalability to accommodate future growth. Through effective collaboration and attention to user-centric design principles, the product can be developed to meet the evolving needs of users while supporting the organization’s objectives.
Personas in action
Collaborating with the research and product teams, I facilitated user interviews to gain valuable insights into user needs and expectations regarding the solution’s integration into their existing workflows. These interviews were instrumental in defining our three key personas and mapping out their interactions with each other. By delving into users’ perspectives and understanding their workflows, we were able to tailor the solution to better meet their needs and ensure a seamless integration into their daily operations.
Site map
I collaborated closely with the software development manager, product manager, and general manager to strategize how the product should function and how it should be presented to end users within the console. Through iterative discussions and multiple iterations, we refined our approach, ultimately adopting a top-down methodology. This collaborative effort ensured alignment across teams and enabled us to design a coherent and user-friendly experience for our end users within the console.
Blue sky explorations
Following multiple collaborative sessions with the Software Development Manager (SDM), Product Manager (PM), and General Manager (GM), where we extensively mapped out the product’s functionality on a whiteboard, a breakthrough occurred. I proposed the idea of designing the console experience to directly mirror the diagram we had drawn. This concept led to the creation of the “canvas experience,” a user interface design that visually represented the infrastructure users would construct using our product. Not only was this design intuitive and user-friendly, but it also leveraged components from another product, ensuring a lightweight development process. This innovative approach transformed the user experience, providing users with a clear and intuitive interface that seamlessly translated their conceptual diagrams into actionable infrastructure configurations.
Usability testing
Following the initial design concept of the “canvas experience,” I arranged another round of user interviews to gather feedback on where users felt the product should be housed within the console. During these sessions, I had the opportunity to showcase the proposed placement of the product as well as demonstrate how the canvas experience would function. The response from users was overwhelmingly positive, with many expressing enthusiasm for the intuitive nature of the canvas interface and its ability to address their needs effectively.
However, during these discussions, a critical issue emerged. Users began to realize that in their implementations, they could potentially have a significant number of endpoints per endpoint group, with one larger customer mentioning they could have up to 100 endpoints per group. This raised concerns about the scalability and navigability of the canvas interface, particularly for users managing large infrastructures. Recognizing the importance of addressing this issue, we understood the necessity of reevaluating the design approach to ensure that the product could effectively cater to the needs of our target audience, particularly larger companies with expansive infrastructures.
MVP Design
After grappling with the challenge of accommodating 100+ endpoints per endpoint group within the canvas experience, I realized that straying from our primary goal of simplicity and ease of setup was counterproductive. Thus, I returned to the drawing board to explore alternative design approaches. Drawing inspiration from the user-friendly AWS create wizard design, I collaborated closely with the AWS components team to adapt components and templates to our specific use case. Additionally, working closely with the development team, I ensured that the updates were responsive and pixel-perfect.
This collaborative effort resulted in the successful launch of the product at ReInvent 2018, marking the first new product announcement of the year. Since its launch, we have received overwhelmingly positive feedback from users, with one particularly resonant quote highlighting the impact of our efforts.