Amazon
Amazon Web Services is the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally. Internal network engineers are tasked with making sure The network is always operational.
The problem
Network engineers were using our product to help them find, diagnose and remediate network events. When I started the product was hard to use, confusing to understand and adoption wasn’t as high as expected.
Engineers complained about a confusing interface that lacked personalisation to meet each of their specific needs and usage. They were tired of struggling with the interface and frustrated that it wasn’t having the desired reduction in their case age.
Research
I needed to understand the problem space better and got a mentor to teach me more about the ‘network’ and the issues and events that the engineers were dealing with on a daily basis.
I talked to the users as much as I could, interviewing and shadowing them as they worked to get a better understanding of the issues they faced. I brought other team members with me too and after we would debrief and run a whiteboard session to understand the problems and to explore possible solutions.
Ideation workshop
During the offsite I ran a design thinking workshop with users from around the globe. I got them to flow out the steps involved in remediating a network event and to wireframe an event screen displaying the information they needed. The findings were used to inform the updated designs.
Flexible structure
The product navigation was simplified along with a more structured and clean layout. Searching and filtering was standardised across the Queue, Event and Ticket screens.
Every view was given a default structure but users were given the ability to reorder and resize each module. Along with this we added a dark mode.
Future proofing
With a more defined and clearer navigation system in place the product was capable of scaling in the future with new features being able to sit alongside the core product features.
