First, I identified which AWS services are universally considered “core” for brand-new customers—people who don’t know what they want to build yet and have no specific use case. To do this, I reviewed internal and third-party “getting started” courses and analyzed community conversations on Reddit and Stack Overflow. I focused on the services that consistently appeared in questions about onboarding or first steps with AWS. This research surfaced a concise set of foundational services.
With those services defined, I dug deeper into what new customers actually need to do with them. I examined third-party training content, community responses, internal customer research, and used AI to pinpoint the tasks that provide the fastest path to hands-on progress—for example, launching an EC2 instance or creating an S3 bucket.
From this analysis, I distilled 12 essential tasks that form a practical onboarding path for new AWS users. These tasks are intentionally generic yet reflect the core steps someone would complete when building a simple web application—an approach that aligns with AWS tutorials that consistently receive the highest traffic.
With the research and task list complete, I designed and built the onboarding experience in Adobe Experience Manager.
Today, the experience attracts ~30,000 page views from over 12,000 unique visitors each month, making it one of our most frequented starting points for new AWS customers.
