Amazon Widget
Starting in June 2015, I was pulled into a project that aimed to sell unlocked Android phones on Amazon at low prices. One of the additional items that would be incorporated into these unlocked phones was an Amazon widget that would provide a glimpse of what’s happening in Amazon right on the app grid.
My responsibilities included:
Doing research on Android and widgets.
Sketching concepts.
Collaborate with senior designer, visual designer, and our team’s producer.
Develop interaction flows and concepts.
Create a final interaction design speculation document for developers and documentation purposes.
Team
Jon Arnett, Senior UX Designer
Denise Borges, Interaction Designer
Mira Kim, Visual Designer
Sean Caffrey, Producer
Situation
This was the second project I worked on while at Amazon. The goal was to create a new Amazon widget that would present items from Amazon. An Amazon widget had been created in the past but was considered unsuccessful due to lack of customer use. The old Amazon widget took up an entire screen on Android devices and could not be modified or removed. It also did not present enough fresh content. We needed to better understand how we could improve that experience.
First Amazon Widget
Tasks
I began this project by doing research on different Android interfaces and widgets. I looked at existing widgets and did a competitive analysis on features and functionality. Once I had a grasp on the capabilities and limitations of Android widgets, I did several sketches to explore how the widget could interact and what content could be displayed.
Example of sketches
Actions
We honed down on some sketches and began doing wireframes using Illustrator. We explored potential interaction models and worked with our stakeholders to better understand what the widget should offer to customers who buy unlocked phones. For the first release, they decided to focus on displaying Amazon deals in a card format. Users could tap through the cards to view different Amazon deals.
First iteration of the widget. The left shows widget at its normal state while the right shows the widget expanded.
Once the first iteration was finalized, I worked with a design technologist to create a high fidelity prototype to use in a formal usability study.
Results
The formal usability study was successful and resulted in a few minor tweaks, specifically with the interaction of expanding the widget to view more content. In the first iteration, the user had to tap on the card displayed to expand the widget. While users were able to complete this task, there were comments on how that was not anticipated or expected. Users expected the card to go directly to the Amazon details page for that item. Adding an expand icon to the upper right corner of the widget provides more visual affordance that the widget can be expanded.
My last deliverables I submitted before leaving Amazon were interaction model specs of the widget for our developers.
