What problem Did we solve?
The AWS Console Mobile App (ACMA) is an important tool used by millions of customers. It enables them to access and monitor cloud resources on-the-go from their mobile device. However, a major gap in the app's capabilities was the lack of support for CloudWatch Custom Dashboards, a highly requested feature by customers (28 out of 280 requests or 10%).
What are Cloudwatch Dashboards?
Amazon CloudWatch dashboards are customizable home pages on the desktop AWS CloudWatch console that you can use to monitor your resources in a single view, even those resources that are spread across different Regions. CloudWatch dashboards can be used to create customized views of the metrics and alarms for AWS resources.
What did we know about our customer's problem?
Prior to this feature release, when AWS Console Mobile App customers received a push notification that a CloudWatch alarm had been triggered, they could only view the details of the alarm, such as when the alarm’s state changed and what threshold was crossed. They then needed to dig through text based CloudWatch logs to identify a root cause.
Customers told us they want convenient access to monitor the health and performance of their critical resource and application metrics in a mobile-friendly format using CloudWatch dashboards in the AWS Console Mobile App.
How did we solve the problem?
I collaborated closely with PM and our Engineering team to expand capabilities the dashboard experience available on the AWS CloudWatch Console desktop version to the iOS and Android platform experience.
These collaborative discussions resulted in high-fidelity, clickable prototypes and redline design specifications I created for both iOS and Android platforms.
The updated designs provided users with a new home screen card with a quick link to a native, searchable list to find custom CloudWatch dashboards and view the health and performance of their AWS resources and applications.
ACMA Home screen
Cloudwatch dashboards list screen
With a dashboard selected, users could now view data visualizations of their critical AWS resources and application health.
CloudWatch dashboards charts view
Users can also set custom date ranges by using the native timespan selectors with tap on visualizations displaying relevant data.
CloudWatch dashboards absolute time
CloudWatch dashboards relative time
How usable were our designs?
The designs were validated with customers through a usability study conducted with 11 participants, two of which were current ACMA users.
Using the prototype, participants were asked to access the custom CloudWatch Dashboards and provide qualitative feedback about the usefulness of what they saw. Tasks also included users setting various time ranges to test the usability of the dashboard interfaces.
The average CSAT score for all tasks in this study was 4.0 out of a possible 5 using a Likert rating scale, and the SUS score was 71.
My Design Process
This project provided an opportunity to define the product design process flow for the cross-functional teams I was working with. Working with my UX Design pair, our goal was to create a reference guide to develop an efficient, cross-functional team workflow. The timeline below represents an ideal product design process flow from inception of a design feature through to completion along with actions to take in response to unplanned events.
This is not an exhaustive list of tasks for each department, but rather a high level outline of the critical methods used to capture user feedback and input from all Product Teams to integrate into design solutions through the collaboration process.
