AWS icon quiz

A note on methodology: typically in experimental surveys you don’t want to prime your subjects with words or phrasing that could lead to positive or negative bias.<p>Additionally, negatively-biased phrasing on a public survey could also attract mostly those with negative views. This would skew your sample even further than solely priming.<p>With that said, I have no idea what any of those icons are.

Aws feels like it was built by a bunch of siloed teams. There&#x27;s a lot of design inconsistency I notice every time I&#x27;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 &quot;delete me&quot;.<p>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 everywhere that list &quot;Rds creation wizard VPC&quot; or something long those lines.<p>Its not clear what fields are drop downs so I have to type stuff into them to see if they&#x27;ll give me a list of options.<p>The UI uses the same styles but inconsistent language. In ECS there&#x27;s a list of entities. To delete an entity you have to go into it and delete all its children. Then the entity disappears.<p>I know there&#x27;s engineering reasons for all this, but I feel like they can do better than settle for engineer grade UI.

Truth!<p>Names and Icons on AWS were made by people who don’t realize who helpful names and icons can be.<p>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.<p>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.<p>If you want something that the marketing folks can feel proud about wasting time on, add the silly name to the descriptive name: Amazon DNS Potato

It’s not jus the icons. It’s the names too since a lot of them are completely unrelated to the product itself.<p>I actually find myself referring to “Amazon Web Services in Plain English” [0] every once in a while.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.expeditedssl.com&#x2F;aws-in-plain-english" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.expeditedssl.com&#x2F;aws-in-plain-english</a>

In general, I would not expect questions around expect people to remember details about a logo just from a name to work very well. People in general can&#x27;t do that even with extremely famous logos: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.signs.com&#x2F;branded-in-memory&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.signs.com&#x2F;branded-in-memory&#x2F;</a> Nor can they generally even draw a bike, with physical necessity available to guide them: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gianlucagimini.it&#x2F;prototypes&#x2F;velocipedia.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gianlucagimini.it&#x2F;prototypes&#x2F;velocipedia.html</a><p>However, it is absolutely a reasonable request of a logo that you be able to go from logo to designated product, and while quizzing about details like &quot;which horizontal pole is higher&quot; is definitely a bit of an ask, you should still see a lot of people getting that right from just &quot;feeling&quot; which seems right.

AWS do put a lot of work into their icons set. That said, we (draw.io) get a lot of direct complains about the icons because:<p>1) They can&#x27;t find certain AWS icons (the problem is it&#x27;s there, they didn&#x27;t expect it to look like that).<p>2) They change and move between sets rather a lot. That was more a problem previously, the set hasn&#x27;t actually changed yet this year.<p>If there&#x27;s a designer out there willing to create an alternative set, we&#x27;re more than willing to add it in and see what people prefer. Probably more constructive than just saying &quot;they are bad&quot;, show us something better.

I work with AWS every day, and I just realized that even though all the symbols have a consistent look, the style is so generic I don&#x27;t mentally associate it with AWS. To me it looks like symbols from a design diagram where somebody was in a hurry and picked random symbols from their drawing program&#x27;s image library.

I don&#x27;t think they have a &#x27;bad icon&#x27; problem as much as a &#x27;too many services&#x27; problem. I&#x27;m not necessarily saying that they need less functionality, just that they need to divide it up into fewer named&#x2F;iconed chunks of functionality.

Very entertaining and bludgeons you over the head with the point of the survey. I got 6&#x2F;20 and several correct answers were lucky guesses. I only really recognized EC2, Lambda, and VPC. That doesn&#x27;t mean the icons actually convey what those are to me though - it&#x27;s just memory since I use them often.

I&#x27;m not sure where one goes in the AWS web interface to view these icons. Poking around the EC2 menus for a while, I don&#x27;t see an icon anywhere.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t say the icons are _good_, but I wonder if part of the reason the quiz is so hard is that Amazon doesn&#x27;t really care if you know what the icons mean anyway. Seems like they&#x27;re mostly used for branding and marketing, not anything users will see regularly.

To me, the icons are far too abstract to mean anything. They all look like the results of someone playing around randomly in a 3D modeling tool. For example, look at the CloudFront icon. I&#x27;d expect something more evocative of clouds or similar, but it&#x27;s just a cube that&#x27;s been cut and exploded with the rear two subcubes removed.<p>That said, they&#x27;re probably extremely easy to generate procedurally:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;iquilezles.org&#x2F;www&#x2F;articles&#x2F;distfunctions&#x2F;distfunctions.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;iquilezles.org&#x2F;www&#x2F;articles&#x2F;distfunctions&#x2F;distfunctio...</a>

There&#x27;s a famous story about early UI fail in some CAD software.<p>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&#x27;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!<p>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.<p>The company&#x27;s response? Supply users with a printed cheat sheet that let them find the icon for each operation. To do a CONNECT, you&#x27;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. (&quot;No, not that one!&quot;)

Where is the &quot;no fucking clue&quot; choice for each? I only use S3 for personal archive and I forget what its icon looks like.

They must have the nicest automatic 3D icon generator out there....

I use AWS every day and got 17&#x2F;20. Thanks to a couple of lucky guesses.<p>But, I believe that at least two of the questions have incorrect&#x2F;incomplete answers:<p>One of the questions that requires a typed answer (instead of multiple choice) shows an icon that is used for both EC2 &amp; Appstream. However, only EC2 is considered correct.<p>In the Route53 icon question - there are multiple versions of the Route53 icon used in different places (do a google image search and you&#x27;ll see a dozen variant). The icon in the top left (&quot;Pole with two offset rectangles&quot;) is used in the console - but this is considered an incorrect answer. The icon in the top right (&quot;Pole with two slightly less offset rectangles&quot;) is sometimes used elsewhere and is the only answer considered correct.

Icons are the least of AWS&#x27;s UX problems. The AWS console is godawful. It should be a case study in terrible design. I hate every second I spend on it.

I think the icons actually are cool and futuristic but there are so many of them an average person cannot realistically keep track of them all. I can only assume they&#x27;re for marketing purposes to show in slide decks or websites.<p>I also wonder if they painted themselves into a corner early on by having them for their early services. I guess they&#x27;re a big-boy company and have stopped doing this earlier but who knows.

SPOILER: AWS inspector has a magnifying glass icon[1], but the correct answer in the quiz is incorrectly marked as &quot;some boxes&quot;<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;inspector&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;inspector&#x2F;</a>

7&#x2F;20, and my correct&#x2F;failed guesses seem uncorrelated with services I&#x27;ve used or ones I never touched. Anecdotal evidence about how arbitrary these icons are.

I think AWS icons are great and I vastly prefer them over Google Cloud’s icons.<p>Every icon in Google Cloud is a nearly-identical blue hexagon. They might as well not even have icons.

17&#x2F;20 But I&#x27;m in AWS all day every day. I also question a one or two that I missed :)<p>People suggesting that they follow Adobe&#x27;s lead. That&#x27;s all well and good, until you release like 1000 products a year. You tend to run out of two letter combos for your icons.

Speaking of AWS, shouldn&#x27;t they also hold a poll on naming? I&#x27;ve seen some saner alternatives in the wild:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.expeditedssl.com&#x2F;aws-in-plain-english" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.expeditedssl.com&#x2F;aws-in-plain-english</a>.

Since there seems to be a lot of negative sentiment here about the icons, I&#x27;d like to offer a different perspective.<p>While using AWS services and leading huge migration projects, I&#x27;ve never thought to myself: &quot;These icons are terrible and slowing down my progress&quot;. As in to say, sure the UX icons are a little wonky, but at the end of the day, do are they really impacting people from getting the value out of the services and using them quickly? Maybe Amazon is partaking in what is often sentiment around here: not optimizing things too soon.<p>Summary: while icons might be confusing and not great, I find zero impact in me architecting systems and communicating designs.

In most cases, the icons are more closely related to the service than the names are, even if they are pretty abstract. Aurora? Fargate? Kinesis? Snowmobile? Sumerian? Obelisk? Gravelbean?<p>(Ok, I made the last two up, but I bet you would&#x27;ve had to look ...)

I couldn&#x27;t even name 10% of the AWS services themselves.<p>Just hover over the products menu at the top: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;</a>

I do not think it is plausible that, for most complex abstract things, there must be an icon that intuitively represents it. The most you can hope for is that the icons are sufficiently distinctive and memorable that a frequent user would come to recognize them without confusing one for another.<p>I am more bothered by names that do not give you any clue as to what they are about, though there is also a limit to the amount of information you can put in a name.

this was one of the more difficult quizzes I have taken in recent memory, and I use AWS every single day. 5&#x2F;20

The author of the survey should have allowed &quot;don&#x27;t know&quot; as an answer. I didn&#x27;t finish the survey because I didn&#x27;t want to choose responses I knew probably weren&#x27;t the right ones. If there are others like me who refrained for this reason, this will skew the results.<p>(The main point of the survey came across very well, though.)

The worst part of the AWS UX is the login page. I regurarly have problems logging in with my accounts

7&#x2F;20. i have never used aws. most of my points were from the matching section.<p>those are some garbage icons.

Point well made. I got 2&#x2F;20 and I’ve historically been paid to use this stuff.

This is only tangentially related but it seems that many of the shapes are built in some sort of 3d program and then exported to svg. If you inspect the official released svgs you can see tons of artifacts in most of the shapes[1]. You would think that Amazon would have the resources to release very optimized icons for its public facing documentation.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;preview.ibb.co&#x2F;dd86RK&#x2F;aws_dms_inspected.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;preview.ibb.co&#x2F;dd86RK&#x2F;aws_dms_inspected.png</a>

This reminds me of those children&#x27;s puzzles on diner mats to &quot;spot the difference&quot;. You either see it immediately or stare at it for 5-minutes with no results.

I just started using AWS a few months ago, professionally, had a couple hobby projects before that.<p>I don&#x27;t think I could answer any of those questions. I actually gave up because it started to feel ridiculous, like I was just looking at random geometric shapes.<p>But my point is that I still use AWS and I find what I need without ever having seen those icons or remembered them. The console remembers my most used tools so usually I find them in that shortcut menu.

I mean, is there anywhere in the console where you select&#x2F;identify a service by its icon alone, without the name next to it? I don&#x27;t remember any such place.<p>If not... who cares? They&#x27;re not branded consumer products that need recognition, just a bunch of services and it&#x27;s not like I&#x27;d have any even remotely good ideas for most of these jargony things anyways... :P

I thought this was going to be about the infamous AWS Service Health Dashboard[1] icons.<p>Would be cool to do a similar quiz describing different failure modes of various services and having the user select which icon should be showing.<p>This is great though!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;status.aws.amazon.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;status.aws.amazon.com</a>

In Amazon&#x27;s defense, there&#x27;s a lack of design consistency from Google and Microsoft as well:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;landscape.cncf.io&#x2F;grouping=organization&amp;organization=amazon-web-services,google,microsoft" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;landscape.cncf.io&#x2F;grouping=organization&amp;organization...</a>

Amazon, like many enterprise tech companies treat UX designers as second-rate citizens. One of the best UX designer I know left Amazon to work at a startup because he was tired of Amazon&#x27;s policy of assigning UX designers to work under engineering managers.

I&#x27;ve always had issues telling the icons apart, but in fairness the recent UI updates have already been phasing out the icons. They&#x27;re no longer on the management console home page, and they&#x27;ve been replaced with much improved category icons.

I got 3 right, even though I currently have the AWS console open and was checking every now and then.<p>The services don&#x27;t even have consistent icons displayed between them, I tend to think the icons are actually completely meaningless.<p>Sorry if you worked on these icons I guess.

4&#x2F;20 not bad !

As a survey design principle, there should be an option for &quot;I don&#x27;t know&quot;

This makes an excellent point, but is a bit out of date, as AWS have already revamped the user interface.<p>They got rid of the myriad of abstract icons, and now use a smaller set of recognisable icons, with related services grouped under the same icon.

Icon are funny, agree, but nobody actually uses them in design diagrams. WONTFIX :)

For those who don&#x27;t use AWS ...<p>I use the AWS console all day every day, and I couldn&#x27;t name a single icon. So my guess is they are just intended to be art icons, nothing purposeful. Or they&#x27;re too similar to be mnemonic.

I won&#x27;t bother taking the survey, I only use a couple of services (EC2, RDS, SES, S3, Cloudfront) and I have no idea what the icons are for any of those services, even if I login on AWS daily.

This is so on point. I can&#x27;t recognize more than 1 or 2 AWS things by icon. I&#x27;ve always wondered if I was the only one who found it kind of impossible to tell what&#x27;s what in AWS.

Amazon would never care about this stuff unless someone independently did enough unpaid work on the project proving it they could determine an economic value to changing it... so congrats?

This is amazing and I’m jealous of the idea. Wonderful!

I&#x27;ve been in the AWS ecosystem for a _long_ time and I actually got frustrated and abandoned the quiz. Thought I&#x27;d ace this no problem!<p>Nice one.

&gt; how well do you actually know AWS? How many AWS icons can you correctly identify?<p>I know this is mostly for fun, but that is a wildly faulty premise.

Unrelated, I&#x27;m looking for a &quot;Save File&quot; icon that doesn&#x27;t use a floppy disk. Does anybody here have any good ideas?

Aren&#x27;t many of the services in the quiz unrelated, so a user wouldn&#x27;t have occasion to have seen the icon in context?

I may have heard of map reduce, but I have no idea what EMR is; turns out its map reduce (not sure what the E is for).

Equally, who can explain what most of the AWS services do in less than 10 words? Therein lies the problem I think.

@elfakyn Please submit a follow of the funniest answers. I imagine you&#x27;re going to get some jokesters .

I would guess text labels with services&#x27; names are supposed to be part of those icons

I didn’t think I’d do great, but amazingly, I got every single question wrong.

I got a solid 3. When using AWS I only look at the colors... Not the symbols.

3&#x2F;20. It was all wild guess as I didn&#x27;t recognize any of them.

Looking at those icons makes me physically uncomfortable haha

But excellent platform. Much prefer it that way :)

I think I only made 7&#x2F;20 from guessing.

Hilarious quiz. Thanks for the laugh

aws icons <i>are</i> just noise to me: totally useless

got 5&#x2F;20 with the help of google photos search,

They should do an Adobe and put 2&#x2F;3 letters inside a box, maybe also color coded<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;e4BJrne.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;e4BJrne.png</a>

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.

hahaha, this is great

Hosting this quiz on GCP &#x2F; G Suite ... hilarious :)

Why they don&#x27;t use normal naming? Like why they don&#x27;t call the DNS manager &quot;AWS DNS Manager&quot; but &quot;Route 53&quot;?

:( Why so much hate on hacker news? Leave amazon alone!