These comments are fascinating to me.
I was responsible for designing, leading, and building the frontend for an AWS service. One of the challenges was with obtaining useful feedback from a diverse range of people. During the product definition phase, the majority of the feedback, input, and feature priority was for customers who were planning to dedicate a large budget towards using said service. I often felt that stakeholder decisions sacrified usability for feasibility.
Regardless, it was the responsibility of my service team to seek and obtain feedback, input, and data points that could help us inform our decisions. But from what I witnessed, it only went as far as to validate our exisiting concepts and user personas of how people use AWS services. Going beyond that was seen as unnecessary.
The universal thinking within AWS is that people will ultimately use the API/CLI/SDK. So, investment into the console is on a case by case basis. Some services have dedicated engineers or teams to focus on the console, but most don’t.
I’m proud of what I built. I hope that my UI decisions and focus on usability are benefiting the customers of that service that I helped build.
A little known fact, in the AWS console exists a feedback tool (look in the footer) that will send feedback straight to the service team. I encourage you to submit your thoughts, ideas, and feedback through that tool. There are people and service teams who value that feedback.
I was responsible for designing, leading, and building the frontend for an AWS service. One of the challenges was with obtaining useful feedback from a diverse range of people. During the product definition phase, the majority of the feedback, input, and feature priority was for customers who were planning to dedicate a large budget towards using said service. I often felt that stakeholder decisions sacrified usability for feasibility.
Regardless, it was the responsibility of my service team to seek and obtain feedback, input, and data points that could help us inform our decisions. But from what I witnessed, it only went as far as to validate our exisiting concepts and user personas of how people use AWS services. Going beyond that was seen as unnecessary.
The universal thinking within AWS is that people will ultimately use the API/CLI/SDK. So, investment into the console is on a case by case basis. Some services have dedicated engineers or teams to focus on the console, but most don’t.
I’m proud of what I built. I hope that my UI decisions and focus on usability are benefiting the customers of that service that I helped build.
A little known fact, in the AWS console exists a feedback tool (look in the footer) that will send feedback straight to the service team. I encourage you to submit your thoughts, ideas, and feedback through that tool. There are people and service teams who value that feedback.