Cloud Services
AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) Onboarding Redesign is a project aimed at improving the first-time user experience for AWS’s managed database platform. The goal was to make onboarding more intuitive, supportive, and confidence-building for new users navigating complex technical setups.
For anyone stepping into the world of databases, the learning curve is steep. Setting one up feels overwhelming, and even for experts, fine-tuning it remains a challenge.
The current AWS RDS onboarding journey spans three main stages — the landing page with setup resources, the configuration process where users select database configurations, and the final dashboard displaying their database setup
Our research was anchored around questions aimed at understanding user needs and pain points
To understand the onboarding experience from all angles, we used a mix of research methods and spoke to a diverse group of participants recruited through UserTesting and our own networks. This helped us capture both broad patterns and the small moments that shaped user experiences
Synthesizing Insights
After gathering insights from all our research methods, we brought everything together using tools like FigJam, Dovetail, and in-person affinity mapping. Through this synthesis, five key themes emerged that shaped our understanding of the onboarding experience
Design Opportunities & Next Steps
Translating our insights into action, we identified five key design opportunities to improve the AWS RDS onboarding experience — simplifying complexity, guiding decision-making, and enhancing discoverability. These include progressive disclosure, proactive AI assistance, a custom dashboard, guided tours, and AI support within the database editor.
These opportunities form the foundation for our next phase — designing and testing solutions that make the onboarding journey more intuitive and supportive. This marks the current stage of our research, and we’re now actively building and iterating on these ideas to bring them to life.