AMAZON (AWS)
Honey Fungus Cloud Visualization
COMPANY
AWS
ROLE
UX Designer
YEAR
2016-2017
Timeframe
5 months
Process
Challenge
I was approached by a small team of developers to help them design and build a new tool that would display a visualization of a customer’s entire AWS cloud environment in one place. Prior to this project, our users were not able to holistically view a customer’s cloud. Our goal was to create a tool that easily enabled any internal AWS user to visualize a customer’s overall cloud architecture or gain understanding into a specific area in a customer’s environment for diagnostic or troubleshooting purposes.
Solution
My role on this project was to deep-dive into how our users were troubleshooting customer issues and solving problems with the tools already available to them. In order to do this, I shadowed over 20 users as they solved customers' problems. I became familiar with their workflows and pain points with their current tool set. During my research, I discovered how the mental model of AWS varied between users of different skill levels. This information was crucial to creating a visualization that was not just accurate, but easily understood by all users. After my research and shadowing, I worked closely with the development team to design the tool’s user experience, visualization, and user interface.
Result
Honey Fungus was well received by many internal teams at Amazon. While we had focused on developing the tool for AWS Support Engineers specifically, the tool became widely used by all departments of AWS Support. Customer Support, Technical Account Managers, Solution Architects, and internal service teams all found that Honey Fungus provided them with new and valuable insights into AWS’s architecture. Within the first month after launch Honey Fungus was used by over 2,000 individual users. Over the course of the following year it became the 6th most used tool in AWS Support with 5,824 individual users and 33,918 unique visits.