AWS App Studio was a generative AI–powered service that uses natural language to build business applications, empowering a new set of builders to create applications in minutes.
With App Studio, technical professionals such as IT project managers, data engineers, enterprise architects, and solution architects could build applications in minutes instead of weeks – quickly develop applications tailored to their organization’s needs—without requiring deep software development skills.
App Studio was launched at AWS re:Invent 2024 and was used by several big customers; Most-notably for some of the technology visible during the 2025 Super Bowl.
I was responsible for improving the design of the Builder experience, which helped non-technical builders create complex apps built on top of the enterprise AWS data, directly onto the canvas.
My role was working with the Product Manager and Engineering to create new features, build mockups and prototypes in Figma, building stakeholder alignment, presenting to leadership, and user research.
Business goals depended on easy app building
It became apparent from user feedback that there was some issues with the existing AI builder user experience. Usability and discoverability issues, overly-complex workflows, but also technical issues, like long loading times or poor AI app rendering.
With a business KPI around increasing the app completion rates, I thought it would be helfpul to create a journey map for the existing builder experience. I used step-by-step analytics to build an end-to-end funnel, to identify friction in the building process, and figure out how we can improve it.
I combined the funnel analytics with screenshots for each step, mapped the steps with previous user research from survey responses and interviews, and created a high-fidelity journey map.
At-a-glance it became clear where the problems were, and what exactly was happening. Many of the same issue showed up again and again. Some users even suggested great ideas about fixing them.
We created a summary of critical areas to fix in the builder experience – specifically around the capabilities of the chat builder, but also about user guidance about what their next steps are.
Our director liked the journey map so much he asked us to put them in all three primary offices.
App studio BEFORE the redesign
App studio AFTER the redesign
VISION video
I’ve come to understand that the organization I’m in at AWS is highly experimental, spinning up new ideas every day – giving them resources to build the next billion dollar business. Some of these products last years, but most get sunset or incorporated into other, larger products. I’ve worked on five products in three years and
App Studio’s fate, in April 2025, the product was consolidated into Q for business, and sunset as a standalone product.