AWS Pricing Calculator Redesign
Year
2018
Services
UX Design, User Research, Design Systems
Company
Amazon Web Services
Intro
The AWS Pricing Calculator is a mission-critical tool used by business decision makers and solution architects to estimate the cost of adopting AWS services. By 2018, it had fallen far behind modern UX standards, with an outdated interface, inconsistent branding, and a confusing workflow that pushed users—including AWS’s own teams—toward third-party alternatives. I joined as the lead UX designer to modernize the site’s architecture, navigation, and core workflows, migrate the experience onto the new Polaris design system, and help establish a flexible calculator-building platform that AWS service teams could use to create and maintain their own product-specific calculators.
Goal
Our goal was to deliver a modern, intuitive, and scalable pricing experience that restored user trust, aligned with AWS’s broader developer ecosystem, and enabled service teams to independently build and maintain their own calculators—forming a platform that could onboard new AWS services faster and more consistently over time.
Process
I partnered closely with product, engineering, and business stakeholders to define the redesign strategy, clarify requirements, and map the core user pain points with the legacy tool. Using Amazon's "Elastic Cloud Compute" (EC2) product as our pilot case—the most frequently modeled product on the calculator—we explored what a reusable, self-service calculator creator platform would need to support. I developed user stories, personas, conceptual models, and early interaction patterns, and led iterative usability testing with internal users to validate platform constraints and improve calculator workflows. As we moved into high-fidelity designs and interactive prototypes, we collaborated deeply with the Polaris Design Team to ensure system alignment while also contributing new components and design patterns shaped by the platform’s requirements.
Result
The redesigned AWS Pricing Calculator introduced a modernized, Polaris-aligned user experience and—critically—established the structural foundation for a scalable calculator-building platform that service teams could use to create and maintain their own calculators. The launch was well received across internal stakeholders, and the core architecture, visual system, and platform model continue to power the AWS Pricing Calculator more than seven years later, underscoring the durability and impact of the work.