AWS Payment Console
The Payment Preferences page will introduce a centralized place for customers to understand their available payment options for AWS services and manage their payment preferences.
My role
UX designer
Duration
8 months
Time
2021
Platform
Desktop
Background
AWS payments had been built by many teams over time, each owning a piece, but no one owning the whole. The result was a disconnected flow that made sense in parts but fell apart end-to-end.
I led a team of three designers and partnered with regional, signup, and currency teams to define the problem space from scratch. What started as a design system migration became a full product direction I helped shape, from identifying customer pain points through research to aligning stakeholders across multiple teams on a unified vision.
Approach
We didn't know what we didn't know, so before designing anything, we invested in research to define the problem, then used that foundation to align teams and shape product direction.
Discover
Baseline study
To understand where customers were struggling, I ran a baseline usability study with 15 AWS customers, split between net-term and net-zero accounts. Across 60-minute remote sessions, each participant completed 5 tasks without intervention. The biggest finding wasn't about missing features. Customers couldn't find what they already had. Discoverability became our north star.
Define
Customer journey
Partnered closely with the PM team to map the end-to-end customer payment journey, from new user sign-up to potential account suspension. By identifying key personas and pain points across regional, signup, and currency teams, we aligned on one clear opportunity: consolidate the entire payment experience into a single, navigable destination.
Design
User flow
Wireframe
We explored multiple wireframe directions with a focus on three principles:
consolidate payment management into one dashboard
separate the payment method addition flow into a distinct journey
design for regional variation without fragmenting the experience
I worked with regional PMs to document all supported payment types, ensuring every component could flex across markets without losing consistency.
Design exploration: consolidated edits
Design exploration: payment dashboardVariation
Collaborated with regional Product Managers to document all supported payment types (instrument resources), ensuring the component's design could accommodate various regional requirements and payment processor specifications.
Design exploration: account level default based on Payment type Deliver
Payment profile
Customers managing AWS across multiple regions were forced into a one-size-fits-all payment setup. Payment Profiles let customers assign different payment instruments per region, giving enterprise teams the flexibility they'd been working around for years.
Payment methods redesign
Consolidate payments details to a dashboard view, enable user to make payments updates and management at a glance.
New payment currency support
Chinese customers completed payments at 40% vs. 65% for US customers, largely due to low international credit card adoption and strict cross-border transaction controls by Chinese issuing banks.
We added CNY payment support to close that gap and meet customers where they actually are.
Impact
Success metric
Launched to millions of AWS customers across global markets.
43% increase in payment profile feature adoption
5k customers updated their default payment currency within months of launch
(a preference that previously didn't exist)Page visits increased from 23k to 33k between October 2022 and January 2023
Customer feedback
“This newly designed page is much easier to use than before”
“The new view consolidates all the information I need in one place and allows me to spoof and troubleshoot any payment issues. It makes it clear if currency, seller of record, or payment method are on track for the customer’s needs.”
“With the new Payment Preferences page offering a more intuitive experience for customers to manage their additional billing contacts, Accounts Receivable will have more up-to-date customer contacts in the long run, improving the ability to communicate with customers and foster more effective collections conversations.”
Takeaway
The most valuable thing I did on this project wasn't designing screens, it was defining what the product needed to become.
By leading research to surface the real pain points, and working across regional, signup, and currency teams to build alignment, I learned that at this scale, the designer's job is as much about shaping direction as it is about craft.