AMAZON (AWS)
Knowledge Management System
COMPANY
AWS
ROLE
UX Designer
YEAR
2016
Timeframe
4 months
Process
Challenge
The Knowledge Center team of AWS Support manages internal AWS article creation and prepares documents for external publishing on aws.amazon.com/documentation. When I joined AWS this team had a very basic platform for article creation and management. While all approval and feedback workflows were done entirely via email. They approached me to help them design a holistic management system where they could easily manage articles and the complication approval workflows that are required for their documentation.
Solution
I worked closely with the product manager of the Knowledge Center team to gather requirements for their new management system. I first presented my initial sketches with an advisory board made up of users of the current platform. I used their feedback to make sure my designs were accurate to their workflows and needs. I assisted the development team on this project and helped them switch the current platform over to an approved AWS style guide. Due to time and resource constraints I had to considerably simplify the document approval workflow for our v.1 launch. This required several design iterations to ensure that critical functionality was prioritized and designed in a way that was scalable for more complex future versions.
Result
Due to time constraints, I was not able to conduct a usability test with a prototype prior to launch. After our v.1 launch I conducted a small usability test with four users. Each user was a unique persona, so they were all using the system at different steps of the approval workflow. I gathered their feedback and worked with project managers to prioritize v.2 functionality. This test also helped me identify a few quick wins that the development team could implement soon after the initial launch to help improve the tool in the interim.