
AWS icon quiz - elfakyn
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdnEEo0o2JgnIt8VOGffhkcYj-C2h9m5_NFzM0Q1AU-P8d0zA/viewform
======
Dwolb
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.

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.

With that said, I have no idea what any of those icons are.

~~~
jonthepirate
Even if the title was "AWS icons are awesome" my results would have been the
same

~~~
arghwhat
But you might not have taken it, then.

Also, presenting options such as "dried arterial blood red" and "slightly but
not too radioactive green" might also make you less likely to put in effort to
select the _real_ one, rather than just picking randomly.

~~~
Jare
I am terrible with colors but I thought "slightly but not too radioactive
green" was a perfect description.

------
Waterluvian
Aws feels like it was built by a bunch of siloed teams. There's a lot of
design inconsistency I notice every time I'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 "delete me".

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 "Rds creation wizard VPC" or something long those lines.

Its not clear what fields are drop downs so I have to type stuff into them to
see if they'll give me a list of options.

The UI uses the same styles but inconsistent language. In ECS there's a list
of entities. To delete an entity you have to go into it and delete all its
children. Then the entity disappears.

I know there's engineering reasons for all this, but I feel like they can do
better than settle for engineer grade UI.

~~~
auslander
Console is just for checking stuff. Real infra is managed by APIs.

~~~
scarface74
The “No True AWS Guru” (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman))
argument...

I don’t think I’ve ever used the CLI to manage infrastructure on AWS.

I usually use the console for one offs. When something needs to be repeatable,
I’ll create a Cloud Formation template.

Anything that’s more conplicated, I’ll either use Python directly or create a
custom resource that gets called from CF.

~~~
auslander
Yes, Cloudformation is my main tool too. I just simplified my comment. Read it
as managed by code, be it CF, python, awscli from shell, and all of it in the
end boils down to specific API calls.

~~~
erik_seaberg
The key thing is a repeatable process that's checked in, which pointing and
clicking in the console is not.

~~~
scarface74
Not always.

For instance we have a process that sends sns messages for alerts. It’s just
as easy to go into the console and subscribe to the sns event notifications
(emails and sms).

Second example. I initially configure passwords with CF (of course with
parameters that are added when you run it.) It’s easier to go into the console
afterwards to change passwords as it would be to update the stack and renter
the passwords.

You aren’t going to store passwords in source control anyway.

~~~
erik_seaberg
For SNS I'd use the API just to make sure every new team member gets signed up
for every appropriate deployment (test, prod, whatever) and every old team
member gets removed.

I agree it doesn't add much value for a single user rotating their own
password.

------
dkoston
Truth!

Names and Icons on AWS were made by people who don’t realize who helpful names
and icons can be.

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.

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.

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

~~~
baby
what about calling the database app "database"

~~~
daveFNbuck
There isn't just one database app. They have Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache,
Neptune, RDS, and Redshift.

~~~
komali2
"fast sql database," "fast nosql database," "redis cache nosql database,"
"graph database," "rds (is actually named right lol)," "big analytics SQL
database."

~~~
stephengillie
As a longtime supporter of Remote Desktop Service in Windows, seeing AWS RDS
took a while to get used to.

They could have named WorkSpace as Remote Desktop Service, which it is.
Instead, many of my co-workers think AWS means only Amazon WorkSpace.

------
maltalex
It’s not jus the icons. It’s the names too since a lot of them are completely
unrelated to the product itself.

I actually find myself referring to “Amazon Web Services in Plain English” [0]
every once in a while.

[0]: [https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-
english](https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english)

~~~
arafa
Seconded. This link was huge to me when learning AWS products.

------
jerf
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't do that even with extremely famous logos:
[https://www.signs.com/branded-in-memory/](https://www.signs.com/branded-in-
memory/) Nor can they generally even draw a bike, with physical necessity
available to guide them:
[http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html](http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html)

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
"which horizontal pole is higher" is definitely a bit of an ask, you should
still see a lot of people getting that right from just "feeling" which seems
right.

~~~
Bartweiss
I agree with both parts of this. My biggest frustration is that even _after_ I
looked at the answers, I couldn't explain many of the logos.

There's a clear attempt to create logical connections: 'directory' manages to
evoke a bunch of cards in a file, EMR is a solid reduce block above a bunch of
map blocks, and so on. The MediaFoo family is actually quite good - I swapped
Package and Store, but otherwise got them all right despite never using the
service. The family color scheming is genuinely very good, despite the weird
outliers like grey.

But then there's all the rest. Kinesis and Cloudwatch are each a bar graph
with a base, but Kinesis is rotated, and has 2 layers of floating base instead
of 1 joined layer, so that totally clears things up. (And Athena is 1 layer
floating base, with bars going both directions, to help confuse the existing
two.)

ELBs and ECS are both multiple full-size layers on the left with a 4-rectangle
split layer on the right, but ELB is 3 filled layers and a flat split layer.
ECS is hollow layers and a 'long' split layer. Memorable!

Database Migration Service is a mix of Direct Connect and RDS theming, which
actually makes sense, but also Elasticache is a disjoint version of Direct
Connect in database coloring?

(I had a hell of a time looking these up to check, because about half the
guides on Google Images are simply _wrong_ about some services. Check out
Elastic IP, which is listed with the icons of 3 other services!)

------
davidjgraph
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:

1) They can't find certain AWS icons (the problem is it's there, they didn't
expect it to look like that).

2) They change and move between sets rather a lot. That was more a problem
previously, the set hasn't actually changed yet this year.

If there's a designer out there willing to create an alternative set, we're
more than willing to add it in and see what people prefer. Probably more
constructive than just saying "they are bad", show us something better.

------
dkarl
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'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's
image library.

~~~
cheeze
That probably isn't too far off from how they were picked

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

~~~
dbla
I feel like Adobe has a similar problem but handle it much better.

~~~
SkyPuncher
And similarly, Jetbrains. Having the product intitials in the icon is
incredibly helpful.

~~~
conradfr
Jetbrains products' icons are OK, but there's clearly a gradual Adobification
going on.

Their designers recently declared that colored icons were distracting (?) and
are currently moving most of the them to gray. Quite confusing when gray
usually means disabled.

~~~
SkyPuncher
Oh, let's not confuse the product icons with the in-app icons. I can't believe
they're taking color away. It's just stupid.

------
binarymax
Very entertaining and bludgeons you over the head with the point of the
survey. I got 6/20 and several correct answers were lucky guesses. I only
really recognized EC2, Lambda, and VPC. That doesn't mean the icons actually
convey what those are to me though - it's just memory since I use them often.

------
mbauman
I'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't see an icon anywhere.

I wouldn't say the icons are _good_, but I wonder if part of the reason the
quiz is so hard is that Amazon doesn't really care if you know what the icons
mean anyway. Seems like they're mostly used for branding and marketing, not
anything users will see regularly.

~~~
zedpm
If you click the pushpin icon in the web interface, you'll get a dropdown with
the services and their icons. You can drag icons into your top bar as
shortcuts.

------
userbinator
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'd expect something more evocative of clouds or
similar, but it's just a cube that's been cut and exploded with the rear two
subcubes removed.

That said, they're probably extremely easy to generate procedurally:

[http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfunctio...](http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfunctions.htm)

------
kabdib
There's a famous story about early UI fail in some CAD software.

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'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!

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.

The company's response? Supply users with a printed cheat sheet that let them
find the icon for each operation. To do a CONNECT, you'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. ("No, not that one!")

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

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

~~~
frockington
I've always imagined it is like Skyrim character generation and they just hit
the randomize button until something "cool and modern-looking" generates

------
azrobbo
I use AWS every day and got 17/20\. Thanks to a couple of lucky guesses.

But, I believe that at least two of the questions have incorrect/incomplete
answers:

One of the questions that requires a typed answer (instead of multiple choice)
shows an icon that is used for both EC2 & Appstream. However, only EC2 is
considered correct.

In the Route53 icon question - there are multiple versions of the Route53 icon
used in different places (do a google image search and you'll see a dozen
variant). The icon in the top left ("Pole with two offset rectangles") is used
in the console - but this is considered an incorrect answer. The icon in the
top right ("Pole with two slightly less offset rectangles") is sometimes used
elsewhere and is the only answer considered correct.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
Icons are the least of AWS'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.

~~~
hinkley
Route 53 looks like it was designed by the Marquis de Sade. Not only was it
designed by a sadist, it looks like it was designed last century.

They’d be better off putting up a text file because then at least the IT guys
would already know how to use it. And making changes would be a hell of a lot
faster too.

------
Yhippa
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're for marketing purposes to show in slide decks or websites.

I also wonder if they painted themselves into a corner early on by having them
for their early services. I guess they're a big-boy company and have stopped
doing this earlier but who knows.

------
aqme28
SPOILER: AWS inspector has a magnifying glass icon[1], but the correct answer
in the quiz is incorrectly marked as "some boxes"

[1]: [https://aws.amazon.com/inspector/](https://aws.amazon.com/inspector/)

~~~
irishsultan
If you go to AWS inspector in the AWS web console then you'll see why they
chose "some boxes" as the right answer.

~~~
HellzStormer
For those that want to see
[https://imgur.com/a/OuNiT2O](https://imgur.com/a/OuNiT2O)

------
Jare
7/20, and my correct/failed guesses seem uncorrelated with services I've used
or ones I never touched. Anecdotal evidence about how arbitrary these icons
are.

------
throwaway0255
I think AWS icons are great and I vastly prefer them over Google Cloud’s
icons.

Every icon in Google Cloud is a nearly-identical blue hexagon. They might as
well not even have icons.

------
jimwalsh
17/20 But I'm in AWS all day every day. I also question a one or two that I
missed :)

People suggesting that they follow Adobe's lead. That'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.

------
TeMPOraL
Speaking of AWS, shouldn't they also hold a poll on naming? I've seen some
saner alternatives in the wild:

[https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-
english](https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english).

~~~
theoctopus
A lot of those names are actually pretty sensible, but who thought "Amazon
Unlimited FTP Server" was a good alternative to S3?

------
taude
Since there seems to be a lot of negative sentiment here about the icons, I'd
like to offer a different perspective.

While using AWS services and leading huge migration projects, I've never
thought to myself: "These icons are terrible and slowing down my progress". 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.

Summary: while icons might be confusing and not great, I find zero impact in
me architecting systems and communicating designs.

------
bdcravens
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?

(Ok, I made the last two up, but I bet you would've had to look ...)

------
Ardren
I couldn't even name 10% of the AWS services themselves.

Just hover over the products menu at the top:
[https://aws.amazon.com/](https://aws.amazon.com/)

------
mannykannot
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.

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.

------
jimmy1
this was one of the more difficult quizzes I have taken in recent memory, and
I use AWS every single day. 5/20

~~~
rc_bhg
Same here. I'd be happy to get 20% right on that.

------
allochthon
The author of the survey should have allowed "don't know" as an answer. I
didn't finish the survey because I didn't want to choose responses I knew
probably weren't the right ones. If there are others like me who refrained for
this reason, this will skew the results.

(The main point of the survey came across very well, though.)

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

~~~
jasonlotito
I have SSO with Okta. It's literally a browser plugin and I select which
account to enter, and I'm in. You should definitely look into setting up
something like that. It takes away all the pain of logging in.

------
satsuma
7/20\. i have never used aws. most of my points were from the matching
section.

those are some garbage icons.

------
Arubis
Point well made. I got 2/20 and I’ve historically been paid to use this stuff.

~~~
sailfast
Yup. 4/20 made me realize how much I use the new type-ahead feature on the
dashboard. Not sure it's even worth using icons with so many services being
offered.

------
10000100001010
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.

[1]
[https://preview.ibb.co/dd86RK/aws_dms_inspected.png](https://preview.ibb.co/dd86RK/aws_dms_inspected.png)

------
koolba
This reminds me of those children's puzzles on diner mats to "spot the
difference". You either see it immediately or stare at it for 5-minutes with
no results.

------
INTPenis
I just started using AWS a few months ago, professionally, had a couple hobby
projects before that.

I don'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.

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.

------
crazygringo
I mean, is there anywhere in the console where you select/identify a service
by its icon alone, without the name next to it? I don't remember any such
place.

If not... who cares? They're not branded consumer products that need
recognition, just a bunch of services and it's not like I'd have any even
remotely good ideas for most of these jargony things anyways... :P

~~~
ReidZB
You can configure the top bar in the AWS console to show icons only, but that
would be madness. (I usually do the opposite and have it show no icons and
only text.)

------
apeace
I thought this was going to be about the infamous AWS Service Health
Dashboard[1] icons.

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.

This is great though!

[1] [https://status.aws.amazon.com](https://status.aws.amazon.com)

------
dankohn1
In Amazon's defense, there's a lack of design consistency from Google and
Microsoft as well:

[https://landscape.cncf.io/grouping=organization&organization...](https://landscape.cncf.io/grouping=organization&organization=amazon-
web-services,google,microsoft)

------
CryoLogic
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's policy of assigning UX designers to work
under engineering managers.

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

------
King-Aaron
I got 3 right, even though I currently have the AWS console open and was
checking every now and then.

The services don't even have consistent icons displayed between them, I tend
to think the icons are actually completely meaningless.

Sorry if you worked on these icons I guess.

------
giljabeab
4/20 not bad !

------
mobilemark
As a survey design principle, there should be an option for "I don't know"

------
samuelfekete
This makes an excellent point, but is a bit out of date, as AWS have already
revamped the user interface.

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.

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

------
captain_perl
For those who don't use AWS ...

I use the AWS console all day every day, and I couldn't name a single icon. So
my guess is they are just intended to be art icons, nothing purposeful. Or
they're too similar to be mnemonic.

------
xtrimsky1234
I won'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.

------
Glyptodon
This is so on point. I can't recognize more than 1 or 2 AWS things by icon.
I've always wondered if I was the only one who found it kind of impossible to
tell what's what in AWS.

------
notananthem
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?

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

------
bradhe
I've been in the AWS ecosystem for a _long_ time and I actually got frustrated
and abandoned the quiz. Thought I'd ace this no problem!

Nice one.

------
anonytrary
> how well do you actually know AWS? How many AWS icons can you correctly
> identify?

I know this is mostly for fun, but that is a wildly faulty premise.

------
amelius
Unrelated, I'm looking for a "Save File" icon that doesn't use a floppy disk.
Does anybody here have any good ideas?

~~~
elfakyn
Downwards arrow towards a disk:
[https://imgur.com/a/dMrixoi](https://imgur.com/a/dMrixoi)

~~~
amelius
Thanks, but the problem is: these days most users don't know what a disk looks
like anymore.

~~~
Drdrdrq
They do know how "Save" icon looks like though - floppy disk.

------
bdcravens
Aren't many of the services in the quiz unrelated, so a user wouldn't have
occasion to have seen the icon in context?

------
tantalor
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).

~~~
oblio
For most AWS stuff, "E" stands for "Elastic".

~~~
RossM
My favourite AWS naming was when E became EC2, as in ECS.

~~~
jordigh
I always thought it should have become E3CS. I recall there's some old lisp
manual that followed this kind of naming scheme.

~~~
nhumrich
EC3S

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

------
maerF0x0
@elfakyn Please submit a follow of the funniest answers. I imagine you're
going to get some jokesters .

------
anton-107
I would guess text labels with services' names are supposed to be part of
those icons

~~~
oblio
In that case, what point is there in having a non-descript icon? Just select a
nice font and turn the text itself into a logo...

~~~
virgilp
Because, while I might not remember/recognize all their obscure logos, I
actually remember/differentiate between the few frequently-used ones.

Also, the logos are color-coded by "service category" if I'm not wrong

~~~
oblio
I agree with you about that in a smaller bunch you do recognize the target
icon relatively quickly, but they could have just used the color for the text
itself :)

Off-topic (and sort of translated):

Salut Virgile, complet de acord cu tine, dar dacă făceau textul colorat în
culoarea "service category", viața era mai simplă pentru toată lumea :) (lume
mică, domne, uite de cine dai pe net :D)

~~~
virgilp
Lots of vividly-colored text is hard to read and makes a pretty bad interface,
too. Also, apparently the whole quiz is kinda' moot - here's how my console
looks now: [https://imgur.com/n9Ohtri](https://imgur.com/n9Ohtri) (apparently
they moved to "one icon per service category").

Ref offtopic: nu e cinstit, eu sunt usor de recunoscut dupa ID (plus am mailu'
in profil). Nu stiu cine esti :)

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

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

------
notyourtypical
3/20\. It was all wild guess as I didn't recognize any of them.

------
tomkinson
Looking at those icons makes me physically uncomfortable haha

------
auslander
But excellent platform. Much prefer it that way :)

------
alexives
I think I only made 7/20 from guessing.

------
ralston
Hilarious quiz. Thanks for the laugh

------
oriettaxx
aws icons _are_ just noise to me: totally useless

------
freecodyx
got 5/20 with the help of google photos search,

------
21
They should do an Adobe and put 2/3 letters inside a box, maybe also color
coded

[https://i.imgur.com/e4BJrne.png](https://i.imgur.com/e4BJrne.png)

~~~
nneonneo
Adobe made a really gutsy move IMO. Some of their products had very memorable
icons, which they chose to ditch in favor of the fully unified look.
Ultimately I think it was a good one - Amazon’s current struggle to properly
iconify their dozens of abstract services illustrates this perfectly.

I actually would be curious now to see how a company like Apple might approach
the problem. Apple’s well-known icons are largely focused on popular apps,
which have very distinct and concrete functions. I wonder if there really is a
clear and unambiguous icon for something esoteric like a NoSQL database store
- I suspect that there isn’t, largely because (unlike apps) it just isn’t
something that is in the public eye.

~~~
Reedx
> Adobe made a really gutsy move IMO.

Indeed. It's hard to make changes like that since it often results in existing
users getting pissed off. Even if it's for the better in the long run.

------
titanix2
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.

~~~
romaniv
_> It has terrible naming too: a lot of services are acronyms, it makes them
difficult to understand for outsiders._

I almost think this was a deliberate choice. Makes the services sound more
important than what they are. At any rate, many engineers I know love to
smugly use this acronym soup.

------
cam3ham
hahaha, this is great

------
tex0
Hosting this quiz on GCP / G Suite ... hilarious :)

------
darkhorn
Why they don't use normal naming? Like why they don't call the DNS manager
"AWS DNS Manager" but "Route 53"?

~~~
krautsourced
Because they are cool internet people and you are not.

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

