AWS Home

Platform UX at
scale

Platform Design + Design System + AI-Personalized Dashboards

In this case study

Overview

Today, AWS Home serves as the central, data-rich dashboard for millions of cloud users: IT professionals, developers, admins, and enterprise teams. This case study shows how I turned it from a static, uninspiring page into a modular, extensible platform that delivers personalized insights.

This wasn’t just redesign. It became a full UX platform, contribution model, a governance framework, and a design system—built to support a growing ecosystem of teams, products, and use cases across AWS web, desktop, and cloud environments.

The challenge

Prior to the redesign, AWS Home was underutilized and offered little contextual value. With hundreds of AWS service teams and an increasingly complex product ecosystem, we needed to:

  • The existing AWS Home page was static and failed to adapt to the needs of different users or evolving services.

  • Internal scale was overwhelming the system, creating inconsistency and fragmented user experiences.

  • Users struggled to find relevant, actionable data in an increasingly complex cloud environment.

  • Internal teams would face friction and delays without a standardized contribution model or reusable design system.

Strategic goals

  1. How might we deliver AI-personalized dashboards to millions of users across cloud environments?

  2. How might we empower 100+ AWS product teams to contribute their insights while maintaining consistency, governance, and UX integrity?

  3. How might we ensure coherence and accessibility across surfaces, channels, and products?

  4. How might we improve time-to-insight by surfacing personalized, AI-driven metrics for diverse user roles

My Role and TEam

Role: Principal UX & Design Systems Lead

Duration: 18 months

Team: 1 lead designer (myself), 3 supporting designers, 1 UX researcher

Collaboration: 2 PMs, 2 engineering squads, design systems, accessibility, and ongoing contributions from 20+ AWS teams

Design

Process

The step-by-step approach I took to transform AWS Home into a scalable UX platform, including discovery, systems mapping, design execution, testing, and final implementation.

1

Research

I worked with a dedicated research team to interview AWS product teams and customers—capturing needs, pains, and opportunities. 

2

Personas, journeys, and stories

I facilitated workshops across 12 teams to align on personas, create journey maps, and prioritize over 500 user stories.

3

Model mapping

Leaning on my experience as a Service Designer, I collaborated with product owners to map a detailed service blueprint of our contribution model. This blueprint defined how internal teams would engage with the dashboard platform and central UX team through API integration, widget configuration, and the full submission-to-review lifecycle. It became the foundation for our builder guides, design governance, and cross-team service orchestration.

4

Prototyping and Testing

I iterated through high-fidelity prototypes, moderated testing every two weeks, and refined UX based on insights.

5

Checks and reviews

By baking regular feasibility checks, stakeholder reviews, and design critiques into our design process, I was able to ensure all the right voices were heard and all teams were aligned.

6

User testing

I led biweekly usability testing, writing detailed test protocols, moderating sessions, and synthesizing findings into actionable design improvements.

We evaluated how users interacted with key dashboard features like resizing, reordering, and content customization to optimize animations, responsiveness, and layout behavior based on real user behavior.

7

Design system DEVELOPMENT

I worked across dozens of teams auditing interaction variations and aligning patterns. I built robust Figma component libraries and templates based on tokens, variables, variants, and commonly used properties. I wrote the UX guidelines and defined behavior patterns such as dashboard flow, widget animations, and click and drag behaviors.

For a deeper look at the design system structure, see Design System Architecture.

8

Detailed design

I standardized our teams Figma files to integrate with the new design system capturing all widget states, dashboard interactions, error states, and edge cases. This became the single source of truth for documentation, developer collaboration, and implementation handoff.

9

Implementation and Launch

I worked hand-in-hand with our engineering team addressing new error states, new edge cases, feasibility concerns, scope changes, and bug workarounds as they implemented designs. The new AWS Home and configurable dashboards were launched November 2022.

Or view the live AWS Home experience by logging into any AWS account

Contribution

Model

To scale the platform, I mapped the entire service lifecycle for internal contributors. This included:

  • Onboarding and documentation for new service teams

  • API structure and widget design standards

  • Submission, QA, and review workflows

  • Support model including office hours, playbooks, and async documentation

This structure ensured that contributors could confidently integrate their metrics while maintaining consistency across the platform.

Design

System

I created and maintained the UX guidelines and component libraries based on atomic design architecture.

Foundation

At the core of the design system were the critical elements that defined the system’s DNA. I established scalable design tokens ensuring seamless handoff between design and code. I introduced variable modes to support theming and dark mode across services. And for global navigation, I defined a typographic scale aligned with content hierarchy and readability goals, and curated an accessible color ramp with contrast validation baked in. These foundations made it possible for every AWS product team to design cohesively, even at massive scale.

Atoms

Atoms were the foundational UI elements I standardized across AWS services — things like icons, labels, triggers, and headers. I defined their base styles, accessibility specs, and states within our Figma libraries, ensuring consistency at the most granular level.

Molecules

I composed atoms into functional components such as lists, tables, menu item blocks. These molecules became the building blocks of AWS Home’s dashboard widgets and were made reusable across dozens of product teams.

Organisms

Organisms were where AWS product logic and interface patterns came together — card components, metric tables, customizable tiles. I designed these as flexible containers that multiple teams could plug their data into while maintaining a consistent experience.

Templates

I crafted templates for AWS global navigation and dashboard layouts that allowed teams to configure and contribute their own widgets nav structures using predefined structural guidelines. These templates enabled both consistency and extensibility across hundreds of internal AWS services and consoles.

Pages

Pages came to life when we launched the personalized AWS Home and MyApplications dashboards. Real data from each customer’s infrastructure populated our components — the ultimate test of our system’s flexibility, scalability, and clarity under pressure.

UX Guidelines

I authored detailed UX documentation covering:

  • Component usage and interaction principles

  • Layout guidance and responsive behavior

  • Accessibility and motion standards

  • Contribution and governance protocols

Grounded in real-world examples and edge cases, these guidelines served as a shared language between design and engineering, enabling product teams to contribute confidently while maintaining a unified customer experience.

Outcomes and results

  • Adopted by across all AWS teams as the standard for dashboards

  • Launched over 50 new widgets using the shared platform

  • Reduced time-to-insight through smart surfacing of personalized metrics

  • Dramatically improved dashboard cohesion and internal UX velocity

  • Created a platform that will support future AWS UI innovation at scale

This project was more than a redesign, it was a shift in mindset toward UX as infrastructure. We built not just a product, but a sustainable system for product teams and customers alike. The AWS Home project taught me the power of UX platformization, service design, and clear governance in enabling both innovation and consistency at massive scale.

Next

Hyundai / Kia - Service design