The challenge

Shared Photos for everyone

The goal was to have Amazon customers share photos with others in a simple and delightful experience by device or mobile app. This resulted designing end-to-end from out of the box experience, first time UX, engagement strategies, and increasing awareness on device personalization.

High-level goals:

• Increase personalization rates of Echo Shows through a “shared photos” experience

• Create a simple and delightful experience for deeper engagement

• Increase Echo Show purchases

My role

Day 1 ownership

Lead UX Designer (Device Personalization, Out of the Box Experience) - discovery, user research, design, testing, and execution.

The team consisted of:

• User Researcher

• Content Designer

• Motion Designer

• 3 UX Designers

• 3 Product Managers

• 4 Engineer teams.

The project successfully launched September 2023.

Amazon Photos Groups Redesign

Introducing Shared Photo Frame

More people are regularly taking photos on their phones. Amazon Photos aims to make it easy for customers to show photos on their Echo Shows and let others in a group view them together.

Touchpoint 1 - Device Setup

Echo Show Onboarding

We proposed for news customers to add photos on their device during setup, by using the Amazon Photos App. On the current experience customers had to download the Amazon Photos mobile app after setup.

Touchpoint 2 - Mobile app onboarding

Invite others in the group

To increase engagement, the refreshed first time user experience allows customers to invite others in the group. The hypothesis is that if customers invite others in a group this increases usage on the mobile app and entices customers back to use the Echo Show.

Touchpoint 3 - Control your device

Display photos with the app

Displaying photos on devices was difficult for customers. I wanted to simplify the experience and use patterns that are familiar.

4% of customers were utilizing the device personalization page on the mobile app and we wanted to target 10% usage on this new experience.

No Photos app on Echo Show

Customers were frustrated that there wasn’t a navigation point on the Echo Show.

What photo rotates?

Some customers are hesitant to display photos because they don’t have control on it rotates on the screen.

“You need to be real careful about which pictures pop up on that screen. My mom would have a heart attack. I was scared what was gonna show up on there so I need to see which pictures it's going to choose." - Participant A

Reframing the customer journey

Photos features skipped during setup

From anecdotes, customers are voicing that setting up a Amazon device is long (10+ steps). Personalizing your device with personal photos is in the middle of the experience and some customers are skipping the step. I challenged the team how we can have customers add photos to their device in a simple way and avoid having customers download the Amazon Photos app after setup.

How we got here

Setting up the backdrop

Several questions informed my design strategy:

1. How do we onboard customers on the Amazon Photos app, earlier on the Amazon flywheel?

2. What contexts need to considered for new and current customers?

3. What is a delightful experience that makes it habitual?

Early on, I needed to understand the surfaces customers will be touching this experience. With multiple interactions needing to be accounted for— the team mapped all the possible scenarios that a customer will experience.

The 3 core experiences that are high-bets:

• Out of the box experience - personalization rates grew from 9% to 33% in 2023 when Photos was introduced in setting up a Echo Show

• First user experience on mobile app - increase groups creation

• Personalization page - simplify and give awareness to devices

Setting up the device

New Customers needs love

New customers are prompted to download the Amazon Photos app during setup, but this step isn't adding value. I suggested that they download the app and select photos to show on their device before finishing setup.

device personalization Analysis

How might we display photos faster?

Amazon Photos mobile app enables customers to link their Amazon devices and quickly show their albums on the device. Currently, customers are able to do this in multiple channels. However, the Amazon Photos app and Alexa App have high engagement.

• 4% of customers are using the Amazon Photos app to personalize their Amazon Devices

• 34% of customers are using the Alexa app to personalize their devices

There is a gap between the apps and I want Alexa App customers to adopt the Amazon Photos App and increase usage. I did an analysis and found opportunities to improve the experience.

• Increase awareness where this page lives. Currently, customers need to do 3 clicks

• Balance priorities on the device personalization page. Currently, it focus on Daily Memories

• Improve accessibility on touch targets on collection cards

• Explore options to expose collections, rather then going to another page

Iterations

Device Focus vs Collection Focus

For the first quarter I worked along side product and engineer to brainstorm on a refresh on the device personalization page. I wanted to keep some principles in mind during this process:

• Focus on what customers want to display

• Simplify and design for ease

• Have the customers photos as the focal point

• Utilize patterns that customers are familiar

For the final option we released a simplified design that gives focus on the customers groups and gives an option for customers to display other collections they have created.

Usability Test Findings

Customer feedback

I tested version 9 of the designs and resulted in some positives and negatives. Product and Engineers were aligned on the design decision and I wanted to quickly test to see hear customers reactions.

Finding #1:
4/6 customers don’t understand the ‘Manage’ button

Customers were confused what the ‘Manage’ did. Was they clicked it, they understood what it did.

Recommendation - we went back to a similar pattern we had on the current designs and introduced a signifier letting customers know that the collection is enabled.

Finding #2:
5/6 customers understood ingress points

Most customers understood they can click on shared photo albums. Some customers wanted to understand how Amazon chooses photos on Daily Memories.

Recommendation - explore content treatments or awareness on how Daily Memories work and how Amazon treats customers photos.

Finding #3:
4/6 customers had concerns on content

Some customers were confused on the labels. They were curious on why it was labeled the way it is and why they were different.

Recommendation - with feedback from the team we decided to relabel each section as ‘Shared collections’ and ‘Personal collections’.

Final DESIGN DECISIONS

The final photo-op

To drive higher adoption of group activity and personalizing devices with shared albums. I had 3 core principles that helped these design decisions:

• Give Shared collections space to shine

• Give context to customers to relieve stress

• Give customers CTA to drive additional personalization on devices

Photo perfect results 📸

The team released the redesign and on the first 60 days the results were in:

• 3% increase of group activity and enabled groups on devices

• 2% of customers invited friends and family on the group

• Large drop off of customers enabling Daily Memories

Opportunities

• Drive higher adoption of enabling Daily Memories

• Increase creation of additional Shared Albums from customers

• Increase communication notifications for customers that bypassed creating groups during onboarding

• Collaborate with Home Page team to increase device personalization as part of the top level information architecture

Stepping up to lead the project

5 months in the lead designer rolled off and I was asked to lead the project.

With this change I had take on the first time user experience roll, presenting to leadership and collaborating with Engineer team to take the work to the finish line.

Delightful onboarding

Starting with data

When I took ownership of mobile onboarding experience I had to take a step back and understand what the previous designer worked on. Prior to the handoff the team launched 10% of the customer based for iOS and got data from customers. This data informed us on next steps for improvement.

Next steps:

• Release of Android OS

• Provide recommendations with 30 day metrics

• Draft an analysis on why we are landing customers on the devices page and not the group page