The situation
Large enterprise customers rely on AWS Config to track infrastructure changes, enforce compliance and investigate security issues across thousands of resources. Years of feature expansion had left the experience fragmented. Customers told us common governance tasks were hard to find, hard to complete, and slow at scale, especially across many accounts and regions.
AWS also needed a platform that could keep shipping new capabilities without becoming less consistent.
What I led
- The long-term UX vision for AWS Config
- An end-to-end redesign of every major workflow
- A design system that standardized navigation, patterns and components, so multiple engineering teams could ship consistently
- Task-based information architecture for complex governance work
- Data visualizations for compliance posture and resource relationships, replacing dense tables
- Continuous research: usability studies, customer roundtables, advisory sessions, quarterly UX health checks and accessibility reviews
Features I led through the redesign included the Advanced Query SQL editor, compliance reporting, executive and operational dashboards, automated remediation, conformance packs and cross-account aggregation.
Advanced Query
Advanced Query lets customers query their cloud resources with SQL. The redesign made a technical capability far easier to discover, learn and use. Single-account querying launched in May 2019, the UX redesign shipped in January 2020, and multi-account, multi-region querying followed in March 2020.
Config Aggregator
Aggregator brings configuration and compliance data from many accounts and regions into one governance view. The redesign, launched November 2019, simplified setup and made organization-wide visibility much easier to reach.
Outcome
The redesign aligned product, engineering and security around one strategy for cloud governance. The design system and research practice gave the platform room to keep growing, and adoption of its core capabilities rose across thousands of enterprise customers.
