Amazon Quick - Powerful, Yet Impossible

First it was only Quicksight. Then came Quick Suite. Now finally we have Amazon Quick. Quicksight doesn’t have its own console or view anymore. In order to access your Quicksight dashboards, you are directed to Amazon Quick. So you can consider Quicksight, as a part of Quick.

What is Quicksight?

Quicksight is a business intelligence tool. It’s a tool to connect your data, build metrics and provide visual (or metrical) insight about your business case. Each metric provides a specific information that is helpful to the team. Then collection of these metrics lead to a dashboard - that can be viewed continuously by teams. As an example, we worked on creation of a quicksight dashboard and we will guide you on stops how we created it. You are more than welcome to follow the steps and create the same dashboard yourself, or to simply read and review it, following create your own dashboard for your case.

Before we begin, allow me to prepare you for a few troubles you will face ahead, and I believe there are also some criticism to take here for Amazon Quick team.

Amazon Quick - Very Bad User Experiment

Even though the UI of the tool looks minimalist and beautiful, the core need of a business intelligence developer - ease of use has been nothing but trouble for Hamza and myself. It’s not easy to explain the entire experience at once, but I can try to put them into bullet points:

There are three types of users in Quick: admin, author and reader. In official docs one can see the effort to explain it simply - but it is still unclear. It’s confusing. Put simple, admin is admin. Author is editor/creator. Reader is view only. Placing an additional free/plus/enterprise/professional account layer makes it overcomplicated, and the administrator can hesitate to not activate something that will cost them a lot in the end of the day, simply to build a dashboard.
Creating a user is a nightmare. I try my best to be polite in my thoughts but this time I can’t help it. It’s a complete mess. The issue is here: several resources in AWS Console (IAM, IAM Identity Center, Organizations etc.) have capabilities to create a user. But then Quick itself also has the capacity (probably in progress) to create a user. And these two clash. So far not perfectly sync. Therefore, you need to begin first creating a user in AWS console, then navigate to Amazon Quick as an administrator to add this user into your project. Then head back to AWS console to provide all necessary permissions as a policy. Then finally head back to Quick console to define once again, whether this user is an admin, author or a reader.
An author is added to a project (which is shown as account name - odd). Yet still one user in project, cannot view the dashboard of another user in the same project. So, why bother sharing the same project? What if both users want to collaborate? I am the admin, and Hamza is the author in the project listed below. Yet, I had to ask Hamza’s credentials, in order to view the dashboard he created.
The Quick dashboard is filled in with many buttons, chat boxes, and other interfaces to use AI features in the project. Yet simple, common requirements are missing. Share, import, export, edit, delete, duplicate. None of them are available so far. Although it’s not a short time that Amazon Quick has been around, but I keep it optimistic that eventually these fundamental actions will be part of the development process.
Finally, the dashboard juggles between cached details of two users once you are logged in with two separate users. As mentioned earlier, I had to request Hamza’s credentials to view the dashboard. Amazon Quick randomly persisted throughout the process to sign me in back to my account here and there. There is some clear space for improvement to this.

Amazon Quick - More to Come

An ideal article would end with some final words, suggesting spaces for improvement and what other features we can expect in the future. Yet I will not follow this pattern because it’s obvious with the criticism what improvements are needed, then we can expect tons of new features in the future (very soon). All in all, it’s too early to speak about Amazon Quick, even though Quicksight has been with us for many years already.

It takes time, and patience for some tools to mature and to evolve. Yet, Amazon team should take into account that many other business intelligence tools are already in the market, well integrated. An end user need a reason to migrate to Amazon Quick. The details I observe so far - dedicated dashboard, AI chat boxes, AWS integration etc. - are not convincing enough to persuade at least myself.

So, more needed. And surely it will come. I’ll be pleased to collaborate further and provide additional feedback on this to Amazon Quick team. Yet first, let’s also cover up a practical example in the following article.