Alexa Communications
Defined a novel voice-forward messaging experience for screened Echo Devices, combining three domains: communications, information, media.
2018 Internship
Voice user interfaces, multimodal devices
Brief
Create a delightful home screen experience to raise awareness and increase engagement for Alexa communications features on screened Echo devices. The comms domain includes calling, messaging, drop-in, contacts, and announcements.
Deliverable: I designed a social messaging feature that allows customers to invoke Alexa to ask friends questions. When Alexa doesn't know the answer to your questions, she can redirect them to your contacts.
Current Home Experience
Timeline
1. Audit and Research
Frame the design proposal
Explore areas of opportunity
Document customer needs
2. Ideation
Concept development
Define key use cases
Present research
3. Concept Development
Key user flows
Mental model exploration
Voice UI reviews
4. Final Design
Refine user flows
Prototype
Present to design leadership
1. Audit and research
Weeks 1-3
My first few weeks were spent getting familiar with the Alexa products, setting up meetings with researchers and data scientists, reading the documentation of past studies, shadowing customer interviews, and attending research share-outs.
I followed the working backward approach and wrote light press releases to validate my ideas from a business perspective. This documentation allowed me to consider unmet customer needs and challenge any early assumptions more thoroughly.
2. Ideation
Week 4-6
During the ideation phase, I was often socializing design concepts. Based on the UX team's feedback and qualitative validation from research, I selected key use cases that bring into focus the highest unmet customer needs. Mocking up these design concepts in low-fidelity helped provide a rough design scope.
3. Concept Development
Weeks 7-9
Explored a wide range of mid-fidelity design concepts and their accompanying mental models, initiated co-design and brainstorming meetings, and attended voice UI info sessions. I worked closely with VUI designers and wrote conversational dialogue to inform my designs. After 1:1 reviews and team critiques, I took the best of these iterations to collect feedback from team review.
After workshopping the most promising concepts, I defined the core Alexa comms experience on the home screen panels as lightweight, easy engagement, contextualized, and elevate people over Alexa.
Here are examples of the nice-to-have features I’ve resigned from; some were documented as vNext priorities. The following functions were either not aligned with the central user experience or adding complexity to the design. Forwarding answers, for example, felt too formal and email-like for an ambient device like the Echo. Linking a message to the sender’s contact card makes more sense to navigate from the message screen than the home screen. Including recommendations as ingress for customers to re-engage with other topics was extending the scope of this project. And the ability to share messages with an added note might confuse which message the customer is actually sending.
Scoping & Simplifying
Conversation Design
Week 4-6
During the ideation phase, I was often socializing design concepts. Based on the UX team's feedback and qualitative validation from research, I selected key use cases that bring into focus the highest unmet customer needs. Mocking up these design concepts in low-fidelity helped provide a rough design scope.
4. Final Design
Weeks 10-12
I often attended visual design reviews, voice UI design reviews, and comms team UX critiques to reach the final design. I spent my last week documenting the process, prototyping the end-to-end VUI experience, and presenting the design to PMs, engineers, researchers, and design leadership.
Use Cases
Weeks 10-12
I often attended visual design reviews, voice UI design reviews, and comms team UX critiques to reach the final design. I spent my last week documenting the process, prototyping the end-to-end VUI experience, and presenting the design to PMs, engineers, researchers, and design leadership.
Friend Opinions – Invoke Alexa to ask your friends (contacts), or redirect questions to your friends for when Alexa doesn’t know the answer.
Content Triggers – Share or forward interesting content from the home screen to your contacts to their device or mobile app.
Location-based – Suggestion of sending questions to your contacts who are in the region corresponding to certain location key words in your question.
Time-based – Notify people nearby to help with time-sensitive needs, just as picking up a package
