Hardware and Software Prototyping
Senior UX Manager
2015-2018
My team of Design Technologists created prototypes of both the software we designed and also early versions of the hardware. In most cases, when prototyping hardware we created working versions of designs created by the industrial design team, which was not part of our org. But by creating these early working versions, we allowed our UI design team to have a platform for testing their designs on the actual form factors which would eventually ship.
In a few cases, such as the Echo Wall Clock and the Echo Show 10 with motion, my team created the industrial design and the core as well as the functional prototypes and shepherded the products all the way through to ship. In other cases, such as the Echo Spot, we sourced our own component hardware and used it to build the first working versions of the product. We used our prototypes to assess designs, but also to run usability studies and evaluate various technical innovations my team put forward.
On the software side, we created working versions of all of our UI designs. Our interaction design principles called for the device to always be voice-forward, with touchscreen interactions used to supplement rather than dominate over voice. Our goal was to ship a voice device with touch, not a tablet with voice. This was at times a challenging balance to strike, as many team members we should fall back to known design patterns.
We also created numerous tools to allow us to demo Alexa functionality and response to utterances that take a long time to train. We also created tools to make it easier for our leadership team across multiple locations to assess our designs on device.
In a few cases my team innovated new technical solutions which shipped on the product. One example is the person-tracking technology that the Show uses to detect presence, which was based on the work my team did on an internal remote collaboration tool. Another is the Echo Show 10 with Motion, which is based on the robotics studies my team began shortly after the launch of the original Echo Show.