AWS Home
Design at
scale
Scalable UX + Cross-Product
Design System Strategy
Overview
AWS Home is the central dashboard experience for AWS customers—a starting point used by millions of developers and enterprise teams to monitor, manage, and launch applications in the cloud. My role was to lead the redesign of this experience while building the design system foundation that would power it—and dozens of services around it—into the future.
This wasn’t just a UI overhaul. It was a contribution model, a governance model, and a design system, built to support a growing ecosystem of teams, products, and use cases across AWS web, desktop, and cloud-based platforms.
The challenge
Create a modular, scalable design system that could be adopted across internal AWS teams.
Ensure consistency and accessibility across multiple service consoles and surfaces, including both web and desktop applications.
Improve time-to-insight for users managing large, complex cloud environments.
Enable internal teams to build within the shared system without bottlenecks or visual drift.
Outcomes
✅ Scalable design system adopted across multiple AWS consoles and applications
✅ Improved cross-team alignment, design efficiency, and consistency
✅ Stronger user engagement through simplified, data-rich dashboards
✅ Foundation for future UI and UX evolution across the AWS experience ecosystem
Key Tools & Skills
Figma libraries, component tokens, UX guidelines writing, cross-functional collaboration, design system governance, enterprise dashboards, A/B testing, design QA, accessibility
My Contributions
Design System Architecture
Built and maintained the AWS dashboard design system in Figma.
Established a token-driven architecture using variables and themes for color, spacing, and interaction states.
Created a widget contribution model for partner teams, balancing design governance with flexibility.
Governance & Guidelines
Authored comprehensive UX guidelines for dashboard widgets, layout behavior, accessibility, motion, and theming.
Worked directly with engineering teams to ensure design integrity across implementations.
Defined processes for review, QA, and contribution from cross-functional teams.
Cross-Team Enablement
Partnered with over 20+ AWS product teams to onboard them into the system.
Delivered workshops, documentation, and office hours to drive adoption and share best practices.
Used qualitative feedback and analytics to refine component behavior and prioritize improvements.
UX Strategy & Results
Reduced friction for users monitoring resources and launching workloads by surfacing key insights up front.
Created dashboard layouts and interaction patterns that aligned with enterprise user workflows.
Helped launch 6 new products using the shared system—accelerating design velocity and consistency across platforms.
My starting line
AWS is the world’s largest cloud service. The home experience for the AWS Management Console, with over a million daily active users had been static and its value highly underutilized for customers. I joined the team as they were seeking to create a home dashboard that surfaced valuable insights to customers across all their AWS cloud infrastructure.
The problem: The experience the team was building wasn’t scalable to the hundreds of teams across AWS. And there was lots of opportunity to think bigger in terms of our reach, extensibility, and customer impact.
I set out on a 1.5 year project to make the home dashboards scalable, accessible, intelligent, and super simple for all AWS and our customers.
My goals
How might we provide millions of AWS users with AI personalized dashboards that are highly customizable with the highest value metrics across their cloud environments?
How might we enable hundreds of AWS teams to easily contribute their valuable cloud insights to AWS home in a consistent, sleek, and interactive dashboard interface?
How might we provide a robust design system and simple tools for AWS designers and builders to create their own interactive dashboards anywhere customers need them?
My Team
1 Lead designer / Design system (me)
3 Supporting designers
1 UX researcher
Adjacent team members
2 Product managers
2 Engineering teams
1 Design systems team
1 Accessibility team
20+ Product teams
1
Research
I worked with our dedicated research team to interview AWS product teams and customers, capturing needs, pains, and opportunities.
2
Personas, journeys, and stories
I organized multiple workshops across several teams to align on personas, create journey maps, and prioritize over 500 user stories.
3
Model mapping
Wearing my Service Designer hat, I collaborated across teams to delivered a service map of our contribution model, which captured how partner teams would engage with the dashboard platform and our central team. This model set the foundation for our API designs, our widget/metrics contribution process, and our dashboard builders guides.
4
Prototyping
I defined and oversaw how our design team would work with Figma to build robust prototypes. These became the backbone for stakeholder reviews, feasibility assessments, and user testing.
5
Checks and reviews
By baking regular feasibility checks, stakeholder reviews, and design reviews into our design process, I was able to ensure all the right voices were heard and all teams were aligned.
6
User testing
Every 2 weeks I would work with a researcher to write testing protocols, moderate sessions, take notes, and synthesize the data for valuable insights we used to iteratively improve the experience.
Testing included measuring how users moved, resized, and added new content to their dashboards to ensure optimal animations and interactions.
“How would you go about customizing your dashboard so that the information most important to you stands out?”
— Moderator
7
Detailed design
I built and maintained an expansive Figma component library. I captured every widget state, dashboard interaction, and edge case. This became the source of truth for our UX guidelines and later for our engineering team as they began building the UI.
8
Design system integration
Working across dozens of teams I transformed all designs into reusable patterns and components, built and maintained the Figma libraries, and wrote the UX guidelines that all AWS product teams use today.
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