July 23, 2023
By Meghna Dash
AWS is an undeniably successful product, but I still struggle to fully embrace it due to its unintuitive and fragmented user experience.
Each service within AWS feels like a product of its own — because it is in their org chart. Each offering has a distinct user interface that often lacks consistency. As a result, users must constantly adapt to different interface norms, making even simple tasks feel unnecessarily complex and time-consuming. To further complicate matters, AWS documentation follows the same disjointed pattern, leading users to rely on 3rd party blogs for simple tasks like spinning up a website e2e.
While this seems like a significant barrier, AWS continues to prosper largely because it addresses an essential need in today's tech-driven landscape: scalability, flexibility, and resilience. Its comprehensive offerings and robust capabilities at a scalable price make it an indispensable business tool. Additionally, developers at larger companies typically specialize in certain services and don't face the same cross-product frustrations.
However, as the rise of code-gen/low-code tools fosters a new wave of developers, it's crucial for AWS to offer consistent and guided experiences. This democratization of cloud computing can broaden AWS's user base and increase profits.
With this in mind, to make AWS an even more successful product, AWS needs to revisit its GTM org strategy and make space for a unified design overhaul aimed at consistency and intuitiveness across products. This initiative needs to include the creation of and adherence to design/flow standards for all AWS offerings and content standards for documentation. Having a unified body that sits across products with top-down influence also opens the door for innovation, such as introducing a unified control center to manage multiple services together — much like an OS for AWS — to make inter-service workflows more seamless.
AWS can reach deeper market penetration for smaller companies and hobby developers, experienced and novice, by introducing quick launch options that work across AWS solutions, e.g., spinning up a website using S3, EC2, and ACM. AWS can consider introducing ‘app-gen’ capabilities of their own; continuing the previous example, imagine being able to tell AWS over an intuitive chat interface to “stand-up an app for my startup website”.
Integrating advanced AI-powered guidance within the platform could also be transformative. It could be an interactive guide, adapting to user behavior over time and offering advice on optimizing service usage or helping navigate the AWS maze. This would not only aid new users in learning the ropes but also potentially unlock more value for seasoned users.
With these changes, AWS could become a more compelling product, democratizing cloud computing and setting new industry standards.