Designing the
AWS exclusive offers experience
PROJECT OVERVIEW
The AWS Exclusive Offers program provides AWS startup customers access to $700k in third-party discounted subscriptions, free trials, and other exclusive benefits. However the platform in which customers are currently accessing these offers will be deprecated and a new page experience is needed on the AWS startups website.
CHALLENGES
With so many different offer types available, the AWS startups website needs a page experience that is easy for customers to navigate and consume without cognitive overload, while generating more engagement than the previous platform. Additionally, we were given only given 2 months to design and launch this experience.
MY ROLE & PARTNERS
I was the sole product designer for the new offers experience and I partnered with the product manager, program manager, and the content management engineer team to define the scope, work-back schedule, and delivery plans. My responsibilities were to conduct customer research, design the full exclusive offers experience on our site, and work with engineers to align on scope and expedite the launch. My activities included:
Conducting virtual interviews with startup founders
Developing the user journey for the offers experience
Designing the offers landing page and the offers details page
High fidelity design mocks with engineer annotations
You can visit the live page at www.startups.aws
STEP 1 - DISCOVERY / DESK RESEARCH
Before starting any design or customer interviewing, I like to conduct desk research and learn more about what’s out there that customers are use to seeing and experiencing. I’d take screenshots of different pages and highlight features I like from them.
I had 3 weeks to conduct user testing, collect feedback, and design for the new offers page on our site. I developed the discussion guide and was able to secure a few interviews. I asked both qualitative research questions and used wireframes for user testing. With the feedback, I mapped out the user journey and made a decision on how the offers page should be organized. I wrote out the user stories that the product manager was able to use for the PRD.
One of the unsettled questions in our meetings between our stakeholders were whether or not there should be categories to organize the offer or if it should be like our Showcase page, which has an infinity scroll and no groupings. The customers favored organizing offers with two or more categories.
STEP 2 - RESEARCH & CONCEPT DESIGN
STEP 3 - HIGH FIDELITY MOCKS
Once I had the customer feedback and stakeholder alignment on the decisions articulated in the PRD, I started designing high fidelity page experiences.
STEP 4 - CUTTING SCOPE & NEGOTIATING
Once mocks were finalized, I worked with the engineers to figure out what they could or could not code based on our tight timeline. I had to make feature tradeoffs such as agreeing to minimize the filter function to just alphabetical but instead get two categories with carousel functions. Since we weren’t launching with too many offers, I decided it was not launch blocking to not have a comprehensive filter system and we can add it in the next phase. I ensured we had tickets cut for these features to be in P1 designs.
Wrap up
This project had a really tight deadline with the business need to launch quickly. I was given only 3 weeks to conduct research, analyze the feedback to produce updated user stories, create the optimal user journey, and design high fidelity mocks. When scope was cut due to bandwidth, I had to make the choice of which features to delay and identify which were not launch blockers. I successfully negotiated commitment to P1 features. The silver lining was I had more time to continue conducting user testing to improve the newly launched experience while the engineer team worked on the P0 designs.