# Visual design experience for Automation runbooks
<a name="automation-visual-designer"></a>

Amazon Systems Manager Automation provides a low-code visual design experience that helps you create automation runbooks. It offers a drag-and-drop interface with the option to add your own code. With the visual design experience, you can do the following:

This section includes the following topics.
+ [Error handling with the visual design experience](visual-designer-error-handling.md)
+ [Configuring inputs and outputs for your actions](visual-designer-action-inputs-outputs.md)
+ [Tutorial: Create a runbook using the visual design experience](visual-designer-tutorial.md)
+ [Overview of the visual design experience interface](visual-designer-interface-overview.md)
+ [Using the visual design experience](visual-designer-use.md)
+ Control conditional statements.
+ Control how input and output is filtered or transformed for each action.
+ Configure error handling.
+ Prototype new runbooks.
+ Use your prototype runbooks as the starting point for local development with the Amazon Toolkit for Visual Studio Code.

When you create or edit a runbook, you can access the visual design experience from the [Automation console](https://console.amazonaws.cn/systems-manager/automation/home?region=us-east-1#/). As you create a runbook, the visual design experience validates your work and auto-generates code. You can review the generated code, or export it for local development. When you're finished, you can save your runbook, run it, and examine the results in the Systems Manager Automation console. 

**Topics**
+ [Interface overview](visual-designer-interface-overview.md)
+ [Using the visual design experience](visual-designer-use.md)
+ [Configure inputs and outputs](visual-designer-action-inputs-outputs.md)
+ [Error handling with the visual design experience](visual-designer-error-handling.md)
+ [Tutorial: Create a runbook using the visual design experience](visual-designer-tutorial.md)