Project Impact
Transformed a multi-day, manual setup process into a guided experience completed within hours.
Increased early validation success by enabling visual test creation and surfacing connection/auth issues sooner.
Helped align engineering and design direction through evidence-based validation with internal customers.
Featured by AWS in an official product launch video highlighting how Device Advisor simplifies IoT testing and validation.
Overview
AWS IoT Device Advisor is a managed testing service that helps developers validate their IoT devices early in the software development phase. It provides automated test suites that ensure devices connect reliably and securely with AWS IoT Core—reducing the time and risk of bringing hardware to production.
Challenge
Testing IoT devices was fragmented and time-intensive. Teams spent days configuring certificates, scripting tests, and wrestling with inconsistent tools before validating basic device behavior. Without a unified interface, troubleshooting connectivity issues slowed development.
Created a flow diagram mapping the end-to-end customer experience—from initial discovery of the platform to ongoing engagement. Collaborated with the product team to guide the service’s launch based on this flow, now publicly available.
Approach
I led the end-to-end design of a first-of-its-kind drag-and-drop testing platform that redefined how developers validated connected devices.
At the time, no visual testing model existed within AWS IoT, so I developed the foundational interaction patterns from scratch—balancing flexibility with the constraints of backend architecture.
When engineering proposed a more traditional form-based alternative, I advocated for a more intuitive approach and put both concepts in front of internal customers. The results were clear: users overwhelmingly preferred the drag-and-drop experience, which became the direction for launch.
Designed a visual test builder that lets developers assemble MQTT and lifecycle scenarios using modular, no-code blocks instead of manual scripting. Screenshot from AWS documentation, publicly available - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/iot/latest/developerguide/da-console-guide.html
- Designed a visual test builder using modular blocks to assemble MQTT and lifecycle scenarios without manual scripting.
- Built guided setup flows (device registration and cert/prereq checks) to reduce time to first successful run.
- Navigated a design–engineering divergence by testing two concepts with internal customers; the drag-and-drop model won decisively, aligning the team and informing implementation details.
- Partnered with PM, engineering, and tech writing to clarify terminology and in-product guidance for non-experts.
Role
Product Designer
Feature Launch
August 2021 (AWS IoT Core – Device Advisor GA)
Team
1 PM · 4 Engineers · 1 Tech Writer
Featured by AWS in an official product launch video highlighting how Device Advisor simplifies IoT testing and validation.
