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Alexa Devices

Senior Design Manager, Digital Devices, Amazon
Project Overview
After Alexa's first appearance on the Echo device, Amazon decided to create a new set of devices featuring Alexa with a screen. The first such device was called the Echo Show, and it led to an explosion of new Alexa devices in a variety of form factors.
My Contributions
I managed the Design Technology/Prototyping, User Research and Production Design teams. My teams contributed in all phases of product creation, from conceiving and crafting the intial vision, to iteration and refinement, to production and beyond.

I collaborated with development and product management at all stages, in multiple locales.
Echo Show v2 Device
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.
Echo Show communication experienceEcho Spot clock design Echo Wall Clock.Echo Show 10 homescreen designEcho Show 15 homescreen design
My Team created hardware and software prototypes for all of these devices.
A heavily-modded 3D printer that we used to create many hardware prototypesA heavily-modded 3D printer that we used to create many hardware prototypesA heavily-modded 3D printer that we used to create many hardware prototypesA 3D printed prototype of the original Echo Show design. A prototype of Echo Show with a speaker that allowed us to test Alexa responses alongside visual designs.An internal tool we created for remote collaboration. Many of the features of the Echo Show were based on this tool.
We 3D printed many hardware prototypes before initial hardware versions were available.
A tool we created to test Alexa responses on remote devices. The screen on the left is a control panel that plays Alexa responses on the screen on the right.Webpresent, a tool we created that allowed us to share design comps with senior execs across multiple machines.Webpresent, a tool we created that allowed us to share design comps with senior execs across multiple machines.
We created many tools to make it easier to demo and test designs across multiple locations before Alexa functionality was completed.
Alexa Design Guide / Pantry Design System
Senior UX Manager
2015-2018
As more and more 1P and 3P teams created Alexa skills we began to see a recurring set of design mistakes from our partners. To address this, my team first created a set of human interface guidelines for Alexa devices. This eventually evolved into a design system we called Pantry.

This team evolved out of our production design and visual QA team, and ended up growing to 4 full time designers.
A page from the Echo Show Design Guide.A page from the Echo Show Design Guide.A page from the Echo Show Design Guide.A page from the Echo Show Design Guide.
User Research
Senior UX Manager
2015-2017
One of our most pressing challenges in the early days of designing the UI for our device was in understanding how we needed to adjust our design choices to the fundamentally different mode of interaction required for a voice-forward device. Users would not be 2 feet away from the device like they typically are for a phone, tablet or laptop, or 10 feet on a television. After performing some early studies in a prototype kitchen we built using our prototype hardware, we decided to base our UI designs on the requirement that they be readable from 7 feet, in order to allow the device to be voice-forward.

Making this change meant that all of our design choices needed to be adjusted. Instead of points, pixels, or DP, we had to use Arc Minutes as our primary metric when determining the correct size of assets. Arc minutes measure the amount of a user's field of view a visual element uses at a given distance. My user research team had to explain to all designers and stakeholders what Arc Minutes were and how they applied to our designs. We created numerous assets to explain the metric to those who were unfamiliar with it, and we created a tool to allow designers to convert pixels to arc minutes at 2', 7' and 10'. This tool allowed designers to understand how asset sizes needed to adjust to different use cases.
Screens we used to explain the importance of Arc Minutes in our designs. Screens we used to explain the importance of Arc Minutes in our designs. Screens we used to explain the importance of Arc Minutes in our designs. Screens we used to explain the importance of Arc Minutes in our designs.
We created numerous tools and resources explaining to designers and stakeholders what Arc Minutes were and how they affected our design choices.