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AWS icon quiz
- Dwolb 8y agoA note on methodology: typically in experimental surveys you don’t want to prime your subjects with words or phrasing that could lead to positive or negative bias. Additionally, negatively-biased phrasing on a public survey could also attract mostly those with negative views. This would skew your sample even further than solely priming. With that said, I have no idea what any of those icons are.
- 18nleung 8y agoI agree with both points.
- oblio 8y agoI think the whole quiz is a joke, to prove a point.
- alexvoda 8y agoI am not a AWS user but I am familiar with what several of the AWS services do. I looked over the quiz and I could not answer even a single question. I also think the quiz is to prove a point. Those icons are not helpful at all. The opposite of the MS Office icons which are so recognizable all other office suites copied the color scheme.
- oblio 8y agoI'm an AWS user, I've been using their service for almost 5 years now. I also had a hard time with many of their questions. I agree completely with your assessment. Amazon badly needs some serious UX power...
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoThey've been tweaking the UI of the AWS console recently at least, but, they still have a loooong way to go.
- xur17 8y agoI was happy that they finally added a simple search tool for their tools on their homepage. It wouldn't be a very sustainable business, but you could make good money selling a chrome extension that cleans up AWS similar to what Reddit Enhancement Suite does.
- Something1234 8y agoThat might just be the most dangerous extension ever, or at least one that could get very messy very quickly if it was hacked. Or someone would be willing to pay big money to have it subverted, looking at you cryptonuts.
- castlecrasher2 8y agoAt first I agreed with you but taking the quiz I admit the title didn't really influence how I already felt about AWS icons. At least I remember AWS' service names like Firehose and Kinesis; GCP's are hard to remember when they don't use mnemonic devices for most of their products.
- thestoicattack 8y agoIf the icons were good, the quiz wouldn't need to exist, right? So the mere fact that there is a quiz already biases the result.
- jonthepirate 8y agoEven if the title was "AWS icons are awesome" my results would have been the same
- arghwhat 8y agoBut you might not have taken it, then. Also, presenting options such as "dried arterial blood red" and "slightly but not too radioactive green" might also make you less likely to put in effort to select the real one, rather than just picking randomly.
- Jare 8y agoI am terrible with colors but I thought "slightly but not too radioactive green" was a perfect description.
- crispyambulance 8y agoWell, I for one, think the icons ARE AWESOME. Admittedly, I can't use them to identify any specific services, but they're cool looking.
- revel 8y agoI'd agree with you if the point of the survey was to collect information, but I think the structure of the survey makes it pretty clear that this isn't the intent. Just from my own experience, I have used the overwhelming majority of these services and even worked at Amazon for several years and I could not answer more than a couple of those questions. The icons are so divorced from any real world meaning that when I make systems diagrams in Lucid Charts I use the AWS icons to represent abstract systems rather than the real AWS-specific meaning.
- hondadriver 8y agoThe quiz is called AWS Icon Quiz. "AWS has terrible icons" is only the title of the Hacker News post.
- ryanianian 8y agoIt's still priming the responses. If the interest is in drawing a truly 'scientific' result, the hypothesis/wanted-conclusion shouldn't be in the prompt used on participants.
- birdtime 8y agoI think the point was that the fault may lie in the poster on HN and not the author of the survey, provided they're separate individuals.
- Slippery_John 8y agoThe questions and candidate answers themselves are also heavily biased. The survey is clearly not intended to be an unbiased scientific poll.
- ryanianian 8y agoSure - either way it's not a "fair" survey. If I were making this survey trying to be scientific and somebody posted it to HN with this title I would be quite upset at them for priming a large number of my participants.
- loblollyboy 8y agoDammit dwolb you missed the point!
- anton-107 8y agoI would guess text labels with services' names are supposed to be part of those icons
- oblio 8y agoIn that case, what point is there in having a non-descript icon? Just select a nice font and turn the text itself into a logo...
- virgilp 8y agoBecause, while I might not remember/recognize all their obscure logos, I actually remember/differentiate between the few frequently-used ones. Also, the logos are color-coded by "service category" if I'm not wrong
- oblio 8y agoI agree with you about that in a smaller bunch you do recognize the target icon relatively quickly, but they could have just used the color for the text itself :) Off-topic (and sort of translated): Salut Virgile, complet de acord cu tine, dar dacă făceau textul colorat în culoarea "service category", viața era mai simplă pentru toată lumea :) (lume mică, domne, uite de cine dai pe net :D)
- virgilp 8y agoLots of vividly-colored text is hard to read and makes a pretty bad interface, too. Also, apparently the whole quiz is kinda' moot - here's how my console looks now: https://imgur.com/n9Ohtri https://imgur.com/n9Ohtri (apparently they moved to "one icon per service category"). Ref offtopic: nu e cinstit, eu sunt usor de recunoscut dupa ID (plus am mailu' in profil). Nu stiu cine esti :)
- SemiNormal 8y agoIt is almost like the auto generated gravatar icons.
- tantalor 8y agoI may have heard of map reduce, but I have no idea what EMR is; turns out its map reduce (not sure what the E is for).
- oblio 8y agoFor most AWS stuff, "E" stands for "Elastic".
- RossM 8y agoMy favourite AWS naming was when E became EC2, as in ECS.
- jordigh 8y agoI always thought it should have become E3CS. I recall there's some old lisp manual that followed this kind of naming scheme.
- nhumrich 8y agoEC3S
- paulddraper 8y agoECS is Elastic Container Service. Which is good, otherwise ECS Fargate wouldn't have made a lot of sense. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/ https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/
- tantalor 8y agoSure but what does that mean.
- arghwhat 8y agoVariable (i.e. elastic) capacity. That is, scalable, adaptive, "cloud", whatever you want to call it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dsign 8y agoThey must have the nicest automatic 3D icon generator out there....
- frockington 8y agoI've always imagined it is like Skyrim character generation and they just hit the randomize button until something "cool and modern-looking" generates
- StreamBright 8y agoThe worst part of the AWS UX is the login page. I regurarly have problems logging in with my accounts
- amiga-workbench 8y agoI hop between several accounts daily and its a cumbersome process.
- jasonlotito 8y agoI have SSO with Okta. It's literally a browser plugin and I select which account to enter, and I'm in. You should definitely look into setting up something like that. It takes away all the pain of logging in.
- Jare 8y ago7/20, and my correct/failed guesses seem uncorrelated with services I've used or ones I never touched. Anecdotal evidence about how arbitrary these icons are.
- mschaef 8y agoI don't think they have a 'bad icon' problem as much as a 'too many services' problem. I'm not necessarily saying that they need less functionality, just that they need to divide it up into fewer named/iconed chunks of functionality.
- dbla 8y agoI feel like Adobe has a similar problem but handle it much better.
- SkyPuncher 8y agoAnd similarly, Jetbrains. Having the product intitials in the icon is incredibly helpful.
- conradfr 8y agoJetbrains products' icons are OK, but there's clearly a gradual Adobification going on. Their designers recently declared that colored icons were distracting (?) and are currently moving most of the them to gray. Quite confusing when gray usually means disabled.
- SkyPuncher 8y agoOh, let's not confuse the product icons with the in-app icons. I can't believe they're taking color away. It's just stupid.
- arghwhat 8y agoThey do have many services, but 95% of their icons, including the early ones, make no sense at all.
- Arubis 8y agoPoint well made. I got 2/20 and I’ve historically been paid to use this stuff.
- sailfast 8y agoYup. 4/20 made me realize how much I use the new type-ahead feature on the dashboard. Not sure it's even worth using icons with so many services being offered.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cam3ham 8y agohahaha, this is great
- Waterluvian 8y agoAws feels like it was built by a bunch of siloed teams. There's a lot of design inconsistency I notice every time I'm in the console. For example, deleting entities is never consistent. Some just do it, some ask you to type in the name, some as you to type "delete me". Some entities have a name and a description field that are immutable on creation, even though they also have a unique id. I now have drop downs everywhere that list "Rds creation wizard VPC" or something long those lines. Its not clear what fields are drop downs so I have to type stuff into them to see if they'll give me a list of options. The UI uses the same styles but inconsistent language. In ECS there's a list of entities. To delete an entity you have to go into it and delete all its children. Then the entity disappears. I know there's engineering reasons for all this, but I feel like they can do better than settle for engineer grade UI.
- granshaw 8y agoI feel like AWS’s MO is to eschew things like usability and consistency in favor of getting features out as quickly as possible. Perhaps it doesn’t have to be an either/or, but as an observer from outside the org, it’s hard to know
- tajen 8y agoAt the beginning they only had a page about the pricing and it looked as if they intentionally made it very technical-minded so as to make it only accessible to experts. Which would have been a good thing, to avoid too much support load from the endless wordpress beginner crowd.
- mirceal 8y agoHah. Guess it depends on what siloed means. With a certain size you need to figure out ways of aligning/comunnicating things - whole AWS is probably thousands of people. You will get siloes. On top of that: it’s not like all services were build at the same time. Some of them are the “bedrock” of Aws (S3, EC2), some of them are experiments that went viral. On top of that: Aws is meant to give you building blocks. The magic happens at API/sdk level. The console is there to help you discover and play with the service in a few basic scenarios (and to maybe observer your resources). If you click your way through settings things up you’re going to probably have a bad time.
- aqme28 8y agoSPOILER: AWS inspector has a magnifying glass icon[1], but the correct answer in the quiz is incorrectly marked as "some boxes" [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/inspector/ https://aws.amazon.com/inspector/
- irishsultan 8y agoIf you go to AWS inspector in the AWS web console then you'll see why they chose "some boxes" as the right answer.
- HellzStormer 8y agoFor those that want to see https://imgur.com/a/OuNiT2O https://imgur.com/a/OuNiT2O
- nneonneo 8y agoWow ok, that’s just egregious. Using two different icons for the same product/service?
- jimmy1 8y agothis was one of the more difficult quizzes I have taken in recent memory, and I use AWS every single day. 5/20
- rc_bhg 8y agoSame here. I'd be happy to get 20% right on that.
- jerf 8y agoIn general, I would not expect questions around expect people to remember details about a logo just from a name to work very well. People in general can't do that even with extremely famous logos: https://www.signs.com/branded-in-memory/ https://www.signs.com/branded-in-memory/ Nor can they generally even draw a bike, with physical necessity available to guide them: http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html However, it is absolutely a reasonable request of a logo that you be able to go from logo to designated product, and while quizzing about details like "which horizontal pole is higher" is definitely a bit of an ask, you should still see a lot of people getting that right from just "feeling" which seems right.
- Bartweiss 8y agoI agree with both parts of this. My biggest frustration is that even after I looked at the answers, I couldn't explain many of the logos. There's a clear attempt to create logical connections: 'directory' manages to evoke a bunch of cards in a file, EMR is a solid reduce block above a bunch of map blocks, and so on. The MediaFoo family is actually quite good - I swapped Package and Store, but otherwise got them all right despite never using the service. The family color scheming is genuinely very good, despite the weird outliers like grey. But then there's all the rest. Kinesis and Cloudwatch are each a bar graph with a base, but Kinesis is rotated, and has 2 layers of floating base instead of 1 joined layer, so that totally clears things up. (And Athena is 1 layer floating base, with bars going both directions, to help confuse the existing two.) ELBs and ECS are both multiple full-size layers on the left with a 4-rectangle split layer on the right, but ELB is 3 filled layers and a flat split layer. ECS is hollow layers and a 'long' split layer. Memorable! Database Migration Service is a mix of Direct Connect and RDS theming, which actually makes sense, but also Elasticache is a disjoint version of Direct Connect in database coloring? (I had a hell of a time looking these up to check, because about half the guides on Google Images are simply wrong about some services. Check out Elastic IP, which is listed with the icons of 3 other services!)
- TeMPOraL 8y agoSpeaking of AWS, shouldn't they also hold a poll on naming? I've seen some saner alternatives in the wild: https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english.
- theoctopus 8y agoA lot of those names are actually pretty sensible, but who thought "Amazon Unlimited FTP Server" was a good alternative to S3?
- giljabeab 8y ago4/20 not bad !
- alexives 8y agoI think I only made 7/20 from guessing.
- dkarl 8y agoI work with AWS every day, and I just realized that even though all the symbols have a consistent look, the style is so generic I don't mentally associate it with AWS. To me it looks like symbols from a design diagram where somebody was in a hurry and picked random symbols from their drawing program's image library.
- cheeze 8y agoThat probably isn't too far off from how they were picked
- Ardren 8y agoI couldn't even name 10% of the AWS services themselves. Just hover over the products menu at the top: https://aws.amazon.com/ https://aws.amazon.com/
- 21 8y agoThey should do an Adobe and put 2/3 letters inside a box, maybe also color coded https://i.imgur.com/e4BJrne.png https://i.imgur.com/e4BJrne.png
- apocalyptic0n3 8y agoThat's the route JetBrains went as well and while I wasn't happy with it when they initially started doing it, I have grown to greatly appreciate knowing which icon represents which product at a quick glance. https://i.imgur.com/wSqVMp4.png https://i.imgur.com/wSqVMp4.png
- psychometry 8y agoWorks fine, but it does make it harder to pick an icon at a glance since you need to spend those 200ms thinking about what the abbreviation means or what abbreviation you're looking for.
- 21 8y agoWhich is why they also have different colors. You just pick the right color. Same way with color coded money in most non-US countries, you just pick a note based on color.
- nneonneo 8y agoAdobe made a really gutsy move IMO. Some of their products had very memorable icons, which they chose to ditch in favor of the fully unified look. Ultimately I think it was a good one - Amazon’s current struggle to properly iconify their dozens of abstract services illustrates this perfectly. I actually would be curious now to see how a company like Apple might approach the problem. Apple’s well-known icons are largely focused on popular apps, which have very distinct and concrete functions. I wonder if there really is a clear and unambiguous icon for something esoteric like a NoSQL database store - I suspect that there isn’t, largely because (unlike apps) it just isn’t something that is in the public eye.
- Reedx 8y ago
- satsuma 8y ago7/20. i have never used aws. most of my points were from the matching section. those are some garbage icons.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y agoIcons are the least of AWS's UX problems. The AWS console is godawful. It should be a case study in terrible design. I hate every second I spend on it.
- hinkley 8y agoRoute 53 looks like it was designed by the Marquis de Sade. Not only was it designed by a sadist, it looks like it was designed last century. They’d be better off putting up a text file because then at least the IT guys would already know how to use it. And making changes would be a hell of a lot faster too.
- brian_herman 8y ago:( Why so much hate on hacker news? Leave amazon alone!
- binarymax 8y agoVery entertaining and bludgeons you over the head with the point of the survey. I got 6/20 and several correct answers were lucky guesses. I only really recognized EC2, Lambda, and VPC. That doesn't mean the icons actually convey what those are to me though - it's just memory since I use them often.
- dkoston 8y agoTruth! Names and Icons on AWS were made by people who don’t realize who helpful names and icons can be. If it’s a database, use the cylinder icon that everyone knows is a database and then add some identifier to show which database it is. If it’s DNS, don’t be too clever and name it Route 53. Name it Amazon Cloud DNS. Then anyone knows how to look for it in the console, web search for it, etc. If you want something that the marketing folks can feel proud about wasting time on, add the silly name to the descriptive name: Amazon DNS Potato
- baby 8y agowhat about calling the database app "database"
- TallGuyShort 8y agoThere are multiple database apps, but yes they could have been a bit more generic.
- daveFNbuck 8y agoThere isn't just one database app. They have Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Neptune, RDS, and Redshift.
- drivers99 8y agoCase in point, Aurora is a type of database within RDS. RDS and Aurora are not separate database apps.
- daveFNbuck 8y agoThey list it as a separate product and they have slightly different logos. https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases/ https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases/
- komali2 8y ago"fast sql database," "fast nosql database," "redis cache nosql database," "graph database," "rds (is actually named right lol)," "big analytics SQL database."
- koolba 8y agoThis reminds me of those children's puzzles on diner mats to "spot the difference". You either see it immediately or stare at it for 5-minutes with no results.
- throwaway0255 8y agoI think AWS icons are great and I vastly prefer them over Google Cloud’s icons. Every icon in Google Cloud is a nearly-identical blue hexagon. They might as well not even have icons.
- mannykannot 8y agoI do not think it is plausible that, for most complex abstract things, there must be an icon that intuitively represents it. The most you can hope for is that the icons are sufficiently distinctive and memorable that a frequent user would come to recognize them without confusing one for another. I am more bothered by names that do not give you any clue as to what they are about, though there is also a limit to the amount of information you can put in a name.
- auslander 8y agoBut excellent platform. Much prefer it that way :)
- maltalex 8y agoIt’s not jus the icons. It’s the names too since a lot of them are completely unrelated to the product itself. I actually find myself referring to “Amazon Web Services in Plain English” [0] every once in a while. [0]: https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english
- arafa 8y agoSeconded. This link was huge to me when learning AWS products.
- allochthon 8y agoThe author of the survey should have allowed "don't know" as an answer. I didn't finish the survey because I didn't want to choose responses I knew probably weren't the right ones. If there are others like me who refrained for this reason, this will skew the results. (The main point of the survey came across very well, though.)
- favidavid 8y agoyou know what? fuck you
- Yhippa 8y agoI think the icons actually are cool and futuristic but there are so many of them an average person cannot realistically keep track of them all. I can only assume they're for marketing purposes to show in slide decks or websites. I also wonder if they painted themselves into a corner early on by having them for their early services. I guess they're a big-boy company and have stopped doing this earlier but who knows.
- titanix2 8y agoIt has terrible naming too: a lot of services are acronyms, it makes them difficult to understand for outsiders. Microsoft who is traditionally bad at naming too is surprisingly good at it for its Azure services. App Services, DocumentDB (CosmosDB now), DataLake, ... are more easily remembered than cryptic 3 letters acronyms.
- romaniv 8y ago>It has terrible naming too: a lot of services are acronyms, it makes them difficult to understand for outsiders. I almost think this was a deliberate choice. Makes the services sound more important than what they are. At any rate, many engineers I know love to smugly use this acronym soup.
- tex0 8y agoHosting this quiz on GCP / G Suite ... hilarious :)
- darkhorn 8y agoWhy they don't use normal naming? Like why they don't call the DNS manager "AWS DNS Manager" but "Route 53"?
- krautsourced 8y agoBecause they are cool internet people and you are not.
- kabdib 8y agoThere's a famous story about early UI fail in some CAD software. Icons had just come into vogue (yes, there was a time before icons). The CAD system in question used a puck on a big mat to choose functions from a grid of names, which were labels like GRAPH and CONNECT and DEL and so forth. But all-caps names weren't very sexy, so the company decided to replace them with more intuitive icons, cool little pictures of the operations. Getting rid of the tiresome and uncool simple text labels was going to win back market share! Predictably, users complained that they had a hell of a time trying to figure out which of the tiny, intuitive pictures corresponded to the concrete operations. The company's response? Supply users with a printed cheat sheet that let them find the icon for each operation. To do a CONNECT, you'd look at the cheat sheet and find the corresponding essentially arbitrary (but intuitive!) squiggle, then search for the intuitive squiggle in a sea of other intuitive squiggles. ("No, not that one!")
- amelius 8y agoUnrelated, I'm looking for a "Save File" icon that doesn't use a floppy disk. Does anybody here have any good ideas?
- crazygringo 8y agoI mean, is there anywhere in the console where you select/identify a service by its icon alone, without the name next to it? I don't remember any such place. If not... who cares? They're not branded consumer products that need recognition, just a bunch of services and it's not like I'd have any even remotely good ideas for most of these jargony things anyways... :P
- ReidZB 8y agoYou can configure the top bar in the AWS console to show icons only, but that would be madness. (I usually do the opposite and have it show no icons and only text.)
- the_new_guy_29 8y agoIm always typing the name in search because its the fastest way for me ; _ ; 5/20 Working without any issues with aws daily.
- bdcravens 8y agoIn most cases, the icons are more closely related to the service than the names are, even if they are pretty abstract. Aurora? Fargate? Kinesis? Snowmobile? Sumerian? Obelisk? Gravelbean? (Ok, I made the last two up, but I bet you would've had to look ...)
- 10000100001010 8y agoThis is only tangentially related but it seems that many of the shapes are built in some sort of 3d program and then exported to svg. If you inspect the official released svgs you can see tons of artifacts in most of the shapes[1]. You would think that Amazon would have the resources to release very optimized icons for its public facing documentation. [1] https://preview.ibb.co/dd86RK/aws_dms_inspected.png https://preview.ibb.co/dd86RK/aws_dms_inspected.png
- notananthem 8y agoAmazon would never care about this stuff unless someone independently did enough unpaid work on the project proving it they could determine an economic value to changing it... so congrats?
- bdcravens 8y agoAren't many of the services in the quiz unrelated, so a user wouldn't have occasion to have seen the icon in context?
- maerF0x0 8y ago@elfakyn Please submit a follow of the funniest answers. I imagine you're going to get some jokesters .
- mbauman 8y agoI'm not sure where one goes in the AWS web interface to view these icons. Poking around the EC2 menus for a while, I don't see an icon anywhere. I wouldn't say the icons are _good_, but I wonder if part of the reason the quiz is so hard is that Amazon doesn't really care if you know what the icons mean anyway. Seems like they're mostly used for branding and marketing, not anything users will see regularly.
- zedpm 8y agoIf you click the pushpin icon in the web interface, you'll get a dropdown with the services and their icons. You can drag icons into your top bar as shortcuts.
- apeace 8y agoI thought this was going to be about the infamous AWS Service Health Dashboard[1] icons. Would be cool to do a similar quiz describing different failure modes of various services and having the user select which icon should be showing. This is great though! [1] https://status.aws.amazon.com https://status.aws.amazon.com
- freecodyx 8y agogot 5/20 with the help of google photos search,
- MisterTea 8y agoWhere is the "no fucking clue" choice for each? I only use S3 for personal archive and I forget what its icon looks like.
- QuinnyPig 8y agoThis is amazing and I’m jealous of the idea. Wonderful!
- codeulike 8y agoEqually, who can explain what most of the AWS services do in less than 10 words? Therein lies the problem I think.
- tomkinson 8y agoLooking at those icons makes me physically uncomfortable haha
- ppcdeveloper 8y agoI got a solid 3. When using AWS I only look at the colors... Not the symbols.
- davidjgraph 8y agoAWS do put a lot of work into their icons set. That said, we (draw.io) get a lot of direct complains about the icons because: 1) They can't find certain AWS icons (the problem is it's there, they didn't expect it to look like that). 2) They change and move between sets rather a lot. That was more a problem previously, the set hasn't actually changed yet this year. If there's a designer out there willing to create an alternative set, we're more than willing to add it in and see what people prefer. Probably more constructive than just saying "they are bad", show us something better.
- sleepybrett 8y agoThis is a bullshit answer. Your design language is the worst and cannot be defended. Amazon has literally all the money. Hire a team, give them the mandate and listen to their suggestions/solutions. Asking for spec work is some serious bullshit. "Don't like it, make your own... if we like it we might start using it! Then you can say you built the AWS icons for free, I'm sure that will be great for your career"
- uncoder0 8y agoI think the guy you're replying to is from draw.io a systems diagramming platform and not from Amazon.
- sleepybrett 8y ago... does not change the odor of his answer.
- davidjgraph 8y agodraw.io is an open source project [1], you're suggesting we hire a team to implement the AWS icons? Asking for others to contribute to open source is a generally accepted concept. https://github.com/jgraph/drawio https://github.com/jgraph/drawio
- mobilemark 8y agoAs a survey design principle, there should be an option for "I don't know"
- dankohn1 8y agoIn Amazon's defense, there's a lack of design consistency from Google and Microsoft as well: https://landscape.cncf.io/grouping=organization&organization=amazon-web-services,google,microsoft https://landscape.cncf.io/grouping=organization&organization...
- Glyptodon 8y agoThis is so on point. I can't recognize more than 1 or 2 AWS things by icon. I've always wondered if I was the only one who found it kind of impossible to tell what's what in AWS.
- notyourtypical 8y ago3/20. It was all wild guess as I didn't recognize any of them.
- taude 8y agoSince there seems to be a lot of negative sentiment here about the icons, I'd like to offer a different perspective. While using AWS services and leading huge migration projects, I've never thought to myself: "These icons are terrible and slowing down my progress". As in to say, sure the UX icons are a little wonky, but at the end of the day, do are they really impacting people from getting the value out of the services and using them quickly? Maybe Amazon is partaking in what is often sentiment around here: not optimizing things too soon. Summary: while icons might be confusing and not great, I find zero impact in me architecting systems and communicating designs.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- oriettaxx 8y agoaws icons are just noise to me: totally useless
- anonytrary 8y ago> how well do you actually know AWS? How many AWS icons can you correctly identify? I know this is mostly for fun, but that is a wildly faulty premise.
- kochb 8y agoI've always had issues telling the icons apart, but in fairness the recent UI updates have already been phasing out the icons. They're no longer on the management console home page, and they've been replaced with much improved category icons.
- jimwalsh 8y ago17/20 But I'm in AWS all day every day. I also question a one or two that I missed :) People suggesting that they follow Adobe's lead. That's all well and good, until you release like 1000 products a year. You tend to run out of two letter combos for your icons.
- userbinator 8y agoTo me, the icons are far too abstract to mean anything. They all look like the results of someone playing around randomly in a 3D modeling tool. For example, look at the CloudFront icon. I'd expect something more evocative of clouds or similar, but it's just a cube that's been cut and exploded with the rear two subcubes removed. That said, they're probably extremely easy to generate procedurally: http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfunctions.htm http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfunctio...
- auslander 8y agoIcon are funny, agree, but nobody actually uses them in design diagrams. WONTFIX :)
- azrobbo 8y agoI use AWS every day and got 17/20. Thanks to a couple of lucky guesses. But, I believe that at least two of the questions have incorrect/incomplete answers: One of the questions that requires a typed answer (instead of multiple choice) shows an icon that is used for both EC2 & Appstream. However, only EC2 is considered correct. In the Route53 icon question - there are multiple versions of the Route53 icon used in different places (do a google image search and you'll see a dozen variant). The icon in the top left ("Pole with two offset rectangles") is used in the console - but this is considered an incorrect answer. The icon in the top right ("Pole with two slightly less offset rectangles") is sometimes used elsewhere and is the only answer considered correct.
- INTPenis 8y agoI just started using AWS a few months ago, professionally, had a couple hobby projects before that. I don't think I could answer any of those questions. I actually gave up because it started to feel ridiculous, like I was just looking at random geometric shapes. But my point is that I still use AWS and I find what I need without ever having seen those icons or remembered them. The console remembers my most used tools so usually I find them in that shortcut menu.
- samuelfekete 8y agoThis makes an excellent point, but is a bit out of date, as AWS have already revamped the user interface. They got rid of the myriad of abstract icons, and now use a smaller set of recognisable icons, with related services grouped under the same icon.
- captain_perl 8y agoFor those who don't use AWS ... I use the AWS console all day every day, and I couldn't name a single icon. So my guess is they are just intended to be art icons, nothing purposeful. Or they're too similar to be mnemonic.
- CryoLogic 8y agoAmazon, like many enterprise tech companies treat UX designers as second-rate citizens. One of the best UX designer I know left Amazon to work at a startup because he was tired of Amazon's policy of assigning UX designers to work under engineering managers.
- ralston 8y agoHilarious quiz. Thanks for the laugh
- crgwbr 8y agoI didn’t think I’d do great, but amazingly, I got every single question wrong.
- King-Aaron 8y agoI got 3 right, even though I currently have the AWS console open and was checking every now and then. The services don't even have consistent icons displayed between them, I tend to think the icons are actually completely meaningless. Sorry if you worked on these icons I guess.
- bradhe 8y agoI've been in the AWS ecosystem for a _long_ time and I actually got frustrated and abandoned the quiz. Thought I'd ace this no problem! Nice one.
- xtrimsky1234 8y agoI won't bother taking the survey, I only use a couple of services (EC2, RDS, SES, S3, Cloudfront) and I have no idea what the icons are for any of those services, even if I login on AWS daily.