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AWS icon quiz

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Re: AWS icon quiz

#81

Post by kabdib »

There'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!")

Re: AWS icon quiz

#82

Post by timfrietas »

binarymax wrote: post #46
Waterluvian wrote: post #22

Aws 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 everyw…

AWS was built by a bunch of siloed teams. In the mid 2000's there was a mandate for each separate infrastructure team to open their infrastructure as a service, and they were given tight deadlines. This was meant to solve internal issues but was opened up to the world and AWS was born.

This is a bit of a myth.

Yes, there was a mandate for everything to be SOA. However, AWS built almost every service from scratch. For example, S3 and EC2 were NOT used for production in Amazon until well after launch (it was a huge migration when the company did it years later).

My team built a world class transcoding service for video and were surprised to find later that AWS had built it's own (much less good) transcoding service. As part of that we also built a 5-10x optimization to multi-part fully-encrypted S3 uploads with a user-friendly client and the response from the S3 team was a shrug, they just weren't interested.

It is actually really common at Amazon for five teams to be building almost the same thing. Some of it is on purpose as a sort of insurance policy or bake-off.

But almost every AWS service was built in the AWS org, even if there was something similar in place at Amazon, at least when I was there (2006-2015).

Re: AWS icon quiz

#83

Post by rgallagher27 »

wbercx wrote: post #79
dkoston wrote: post #53

Truth! 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 t…

And why "Amazon" EC2 but "AWS" Lambda? It throws me off every time I look at an alphabetically sorted list of the services. Granted, Microsoft slaps "Azure" in front of some of their services, but Amazon seems to optimise for having "AWS" and "Amazon" mentioned together as many times as possible, as if we need to be reminded.

`Amazon` named services are core building blocks (e.g. ec2 is just servers). `AWS` are services built on top of the `Amazon` services (e.g. Lambda runs on their EC2 machines, Batch runs on EC2 machines). usually

Re: AWS icon quiz

#84

Post by auslander »

scarface74 wrote: post #67
auslander wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Console is just for checking stuff. Real infra is managed by APIs.

The “No True AWS Guru” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman ) argument... I don’t think I’ve ever used the CLI to manage infrastructure on AWS. I usually use the console for one offs. When something needs to be repeatable, I’ll create a Cloud Formation template. Anything that’s more conplicated, I’ll either use Python directly or create a custom resource that gets called from CF.

Yes, Cloudformation is my main tool too. I just simplified my comment. Read it as managed by code, be it CF, python, awscli from shell, and all of it in the end boils down to specific API calls.

Re: AWS icon quiz

#86

Post by conradfr »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #69
dbla wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like Adobe has a similar problem but handle it much better.

And similarly, Jetbrains. Having the product intitials in the icon is incredibly helpful.

Jetbrains 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.

Re: AWS icon quiz

#87

Post by drivers99 »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #74
baby wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about calling the database app "database"

There isn't just one database app. They have Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Neptune, RDS, and Redshift.

Case in point, Aurora is a type of database within RDS. RDS and Aurora are not separate database apps.

Re: AWS icon quiz

#88

Post by romaniv »

titanix2 wrote: post #75

It 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.

>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.

Re: AWS icon quiz

#89

Post by Cthulhu_ »

oblio wrote: post #59
alexvoda wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

I'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...

They've been tweaking the UI of the AWS console recently at least, but, they still have a loooong way to go.

Re: AWS icon quiz

#90

Post by crazygringo »

I 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

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