3 ms·

> It's aimed at the highly skilled developers who would get the concepts in a blink, Do you have any advice on how we could make this stuff more accessible to

by ranman 9y ago

> It's aimed at the highly skilled developers who would get the concepts in a blink, Do you have any advice on how we could make this stuff more accessible to new developers? When you say the presentation do you mean the overall marketing, the UX, or just the CSS?

digger250 9y ago
I think AWS needs a good UX designer. I find that using AWS can be overwhelming at first. Here's a few suggestions: 1. Take "Amazon" out of every product name. Have a look at this list for example: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws_service_limits.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws_service_lim... This adds nothing but clutter to the page. 2. Stop calling everything "Simple". If it's simple, people will be able to tell for themselves. Calling things simple potentially makes people feel dumb if they have a problem with it. 3. The sheer number of offerings (over 18 groups with multiple items) on the "Services" tab of the AWS management console is overwhelming. I'd have a designer see if there was a better way of organizing things.
kirillzubovsky 9y ago
All of the above. AWS is the Google Cloud right now, but it's missing the "Firebase" equivalent. I know a ton of people who have no problem spinning out an EC2 instance to scrape the web for all their needs in a heart beat, and yet I don't know many who just want to make software for people, without all the complexity of setting things up. Look at Firebase, they have "Authentication", "Database", "Storage", and "Functions". If I want to Auth users into my app, it's quite literally a one line of code. Meanwhile Amazon has "Cognito," which requires setting up identities, rules, connecting it to other AWS services ... head explodes. That's a small example, but AWS is built for some serious enterprise business, and if you want to make something like Firebase, you need to repackage it all, and dumb it down to a simple use case. Run whatever 265 services are necessary in the background, but give the user 1 thing to worry about. I fully understand that would be really hard to do, but that's the point. Gotta do the hard thing for the user, and they will come. As far as UX/css/visual, it's all of it. Like another commenter mentioned, in order to make things pleasant you gotta move away from the AWS style guide and towards something unique and friendly. Right now the entire AWS website look like it's been built in a spare time by a sys admin (because it probably has been). IMO it's okay to make "AWS Light" a stand-alone offering, like Heroku, but that means you need to commit to maintaining such a service, and from what I hear through the grapevine Amazon is quite happy to be the piping for the internet, without having to run the consumer side of things.
- ranman 9y ago
  Thanks for all the insight! Have you seen lightsail or codestar?

by ranman 9y ago

digger250 9y ago

I think AWS needs a good UX designer. I find that using AWS can be overwhelming at first. Here's a few suggestions: 1. Take "Amazon" out of every product name. Have a look at this list for example: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws_service_limits.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws_service_lim... This adds nothing but clutter to the page. 2. Stop calling everything "Simple". If it's simple, people will be able to tell for themselves. Calling things simple potentially makes people feel dumb if they have a problem with it. 3. The sheer number of offerings (over 18 groups with multiple items) on the "Services" tab of the AWS management console is overwhelming. I'd have a designer see if there was a better way of organizing things.

kirillzubovsky 9y ago

All of the above. AWS is the Google Cloud right now, but it's missing the "Firebase" equivalent. I know a ton of people who have no problem spinning out an EC2 instance to scrape the web for all their needs in a heart beat, and yet I don't know many who just want to make software for people, without all the complexity of setting things up. Look at Firebase, they have "Authentication", "Database", "Storage", and "Functions". If I want to Auth users into my app, it's quite literally a one line of code. Meanwhile Amazon has "Cognito," which requires setting up identities, rules, connecting it to other AWS services ... head explodes. That's a small example, but AWS is built for some serious enterprise business, and if you want to make something like Firebase, you need to repackage it all, and dumb it down to a simple use case. Run whatever 265 services are necessary in the background, but give the user 1 thing to worry about. I fully understand that would be really hard to do, but that's the point. Gotta do the hard thing for the user, and they will come. As far as UX/css/visual, it's all of it. Like another commenter mentioned, in order to make things pleasant you gotta move away from the AWS style guide and towards something unique and friendly. Right now the entire AWS website look like it's been built in a spare time by a sys admin (because it probably has been). IMO it's okay to make "AWS Light" a stand-alone offering, like Heroku, but that means you need to commit to maintaining such a service, and from what I hear through the grapevine Amazon is quite happy to be the piping for the internet, without having to run the consumer side of things.

ranman 9y ago
Thanks for all the insight! Have you seen lightsail or codestar?