Amazon

As a Visual UX Designer for Alexa Design Systems, I get to craft visually compelling and uniquely delightful customer experiences for screens big and small. From the Alexa app to FireTV, I work with a diversely talented team dedicated to delivering highly functional and supremely beautiful opportunities of engagement.

Multimodal Experiences

Screen devices for the home are a primary focus of my role at Amazon. I am challenged to explore and create compositions that tell a story, gleam an idea, inform and instruct, dazzle and delight… sometimes all at once. My canvas often contains various forms of information and can vary in size, from screens which fit on a night stand to others that hang on the wall.

Echo Spot Personality

I had the opportunity to develop and create animated Alexa responses found on this fun, little device. The illustrations that I created were meant to match the Echo Spot’s friendly, round shape and help connect customers and Alexa in a fun and and effortless way. While designing each response, I needed to consider motion implementation and find a universal appeal which conveyed a quick-read for all twelve utterances.

I simplified elements, then limited the color palette for cohesiveness and easy comprehension.

My close partnership with the device motion team resulted in twelve interactive personality moments which customers could discover with Alexa while using their new Echo Spot.

For visuals, I wanted to create shapes that felt naturalistic and vaguely familiar, yet leaving a sense of otherworldly mystery and intrigue. For each different artistic direction I created a storyboard of four distinct, static visual variations for the motion team to implement, timed to a haunting and mesmerizing soundtrack created by the sound team specifically for these ambient experiences.

Alexa Greetings – Echo Show 10

A first for the Echo family, this home screen device is designed to move with you by using motion and voice detection. I was able to work with Product, Motion and Sound designers to create delightful moments with Alexa. I also collaborated with the team to work around on-screen motion limitations using a cross-fade technique, which involved taking 3 different illustrations that I created of a single scene to create the illusion of change as the device screen moves.

Alexa Start-up Screen

My exploration for a proposed start-up screen experience on the new Echo Show 10

Alexa Timers

I collaborated with the motion team to create these unexpectedly delightful moments that help put the fun in everyday duties.

Alexa Kid Screens

Some illustrated backgrounds I explored for kid-themed start-up and content screens

Scalable and Elevated

I was tasked with helping create a design system for the new Echo Show 5 that was scalable and able to live with many different domain experiences that relied more on automation and less on curation. This involved extensive color mapping, creating backgrounds that lived well with several different rotating images, and in certain cases, creating illustrations that integrated well with the new split-screen design. Everything needed to meet accessibility requirements and provide an elevated and eye-catching stage for content and information.

Set-Up Experiences – Echo Devices

Before experiencing the delightful side of Alexa, customers have to set-up their new Echo Show for things like motion detection and visual ID. My goal was to help create an early connection between customer and device that felt humanistic, approachable and fun to look at, without taking away from vital information needed to complete the set-up flow.

Mounting Instructions – Echo Show 15

Echo Show 15 is the largest screen device in the Amazon suite. It works in landscape and portrait orientation and you can mount it on a wall. The creative needed to compliment the copy with “quick ready” qualities and avoid looking like instructional diagrams. This is a first impressions experience with the device, so it needed to feel elevated.

New Weather Icons – Echo Devices

With weather conditions considered an essential need-to-know for the home screen on Echo devices, it made sense to revisit the library of weather visuals. The previous catalogue sufficiently conveyed the current weather status, but visually, they lacked depth and felt stagnate. My intentions were to add some depth, character and a sense of transition despite the absence of motion in final product. The new visuals also needed to work for several different scenarios and sizes.

Project Polaris and Alexa Live

I was able to contribute my skills towards an Amazon website rebrand and also for a new website created for a yearly conference that the company hosts for developers. I collaborated with a talented army of UX/UI/Motion Designers and Engineers. The explorations that we presented were chosen from a large pool of initial proposals from internal talent and external vendors.

Project Polaris

Amazon hosts a website specifically catered for developers that provides a portal for services like technical documentation, UX guides, developer building tools and tutorials. I worked closely with Senior Designers to create a future-forward aesthetic that felt spacey and limitless. With my backgrounds and iconography, I wanted to create a visual language that conveyed movement, wonder and other-worldly feels.

Early Explorations

My initial thinking for this project delved into abstract shapes and patterns that are symbolic of the intricate tools and other intangibles required by developers in order to implement their highly specialized skillset. I was also exploring a light-mode version of the preferred direction.

Alexa Live Website

This website is a portal for developers and engineers to register and learn more about guest speakers, discussions and workshops that are scheduled for the yearly event. The Polaris website revamp was such a hit that leadership wanted Alexa Live to echo the same etherial look and feel. For Alexa Live I chose colors more closely relatable to Amazon’s brand colors.