MY ROLE
Design manager: 4 designers and 2 researchers
For two years, the design team was managed by product management. I was hired in as the first design manager for the team. Below is the design charter and process that I created and shared with the entire Alexa Entertainment team to help them better understand how our UX team integrates with the rest of product team.
ALEXA ENTERTAINMENT DESIGN CHARTER
We design voice forward, multi-modal experiences that enable our customers to interact with Music and Video content in a more natural, engaging and intuitive way.
HOW DO WE ACCOMPLISH THIS CHARTER?
AED+R has a purview that enables us to identify trends and patterns that lead to unique insights that drive relevant, usable product innovation for our customers. We collaborate with internal and external partners during all phases of the product development cycle to help define, design, deliver and distribute voice and multi-modal solutions for our customers. We ensure that by following AED+R’s insights, guidelines and feature solutions our partners are guaranteed to ship meaningful, usable and delightful voice forward and multi-modal solutions across multiple services, devices and countries.
WHO ARE OUR PARTNERS?
Music, Book and Video services and device partners who desire the value proposition of a seamless, innovative voice and multi-modal experience.
1P,2P,3P, PM’s and designers that want to incorporate Alexa Entertainment experiences onto their devices.
HOW WE WORK
We aim for the highest performance possible on any platform. We start by designing for the best possible experience on low performance devices, and progressively enhance towards our Hero UI experience on FTV to leverage strengths of high-end devices.
HOW WE MAKE DECISIONS
We aim for maximum UX coherency and carefully justify coherence gaps. We only diverge from Symphony where clear platform or customer justification exists. Based on customer and platform data we improve the experience where appropriate.
We don’t compromise on UX quality or application performance in our execution. Whenever hard dates force hard decisions, we evaluate de-scoping features from releases rather than reducing application UI quality or performance. We aim to understand the business requirements and translate them into customer problems and opportunities.
What is Speaker ID?
When Alexa recognizes who is speaking and tailors content based on that speaker's personal preferences, that is Speaker ID. Our team partnered with the Alexa Speaker ID team to design how a customer creates a speaker ID account for their music and video services.
A majority of what we design for Alexa entertainment is multi-modal. Simultaneously, we design UI’s for both voice and graphical user interfaces.
In the current Alexa app, we were responsible for designing the UX for the ‘Music’ section.
In the Alexa app, we were responsible for designing the UX for the ‘Music’ section of the app.
Information architecture/sitemap for the Music section of the Alexa mobile app.
Music alarms was a huge request from our customers. We listened and designed the VUI experience.
Spaces
Control music from any room on any Echo supported device with your voice. Our UX team partnered with Sonos to build a Spaces experience for their Alexa enabled speakers.
