Amazon Fire Tablets

Starting in May 2015, I started working as an contract interaction designer for the Fire tablets team in the Digital User Experience division of Amazon. I focused on the Search experience by investigating various user flows, scenarios, and edge cases related to the tablet search user experience.

My responsibilities included:

Team

Situation

My first project at Amazon involved looking at the proposed interaction model for universal search on Fire OS 5 tablets. My team had just received push back from our engineering team on the current design for scoped search. It was my task to help the UX design lead find another solution for this push back.

Fire OS 5 is unique in that it offers content-focused channels for books, games, apps, video, music, audiobooks, and newsstand. On the main home channel, users can do a search providing universal results from the web, the Amazon store, and their Amazon Library. Content channels provide scoped results with Amazon store suggestions pushed to the top. We needed to make sure this was clear to users and not constraining to the user’s search experience.

Tasks

I did research on universal and scoped search experience and a competitive analysis on how other e-commerce competitors provide a scoped search experience for their customers. I sketched various concepts that explored universal and scoped searches and refined it to three final concepts. I presented these concepts to my design lead and team and noted the pros and cons for each concept.

We went forward with a concept that provided a hint in the search bar of every content page available on Fire OS 5. Users can do a scoped search for books, games, apps, video, music, audiobooks, and newsstand content. The experience was very similar to what users saw on Amazon’s shopping app, which pushed scoped results (based on the channel’s category and search query) to the top within search suggestions and results. If there were no scoped suggestions, search would provide universal results which included web suggestions.

Actions

Over the next couple of weeks, I explored various edge cases, created storyboards and defined the interaction model for this new proposed concept. I worked with my design lead and producer to make sure we had strong communication with the engineering team to address any issues with the new design. I created a final interaction design spec that addressed how this new concept would work.

Results

Once the interaction design spec was finished, I continued to lead in any final discussions related to search on Fire OS5 tablets. If we received any questions from our engineering team, I would make sure to quickly address the issues and follow up with updating the spec if needed. I also did quality assurance testing on the builds our engineering team would provide to make sure they were following our design spec. If any issues would arise, I would file bugs addressing what needed to be fixed and what area of the spec to reference.