Alexa Themes is a brand new way for users to immerse themselves in themed experiences across different experiences ranging from utility forward interactions like weather, times and alarms to delightful pleasantries like jokes. When a customer opts into a theme, for certain interactions, they’ll receive customized content, images and sound effects relevant to the theme.
My role
Lead UX Designer
Defined an end to end customer flow for the themes, worked with partner teams to execute new customer experiences, developed visual process and production guidance, created visuals and marketing materials for several themes, and defined how themes might look in the future.
Results
Launched 16 Themes - 11 branded themes and 5 in house, with more in the pipeline
Millions of customers reached
Created visual production guide and pitch templates for scalable handoff
Process improvement led to a 1/4 time reduction on image upload
Timeline
Feb 2022 - Ongoing
Team
Alexa Personality lead voice designers, product managers, and engineers
Current Experience & Problems
The default Alexa experience is straight to the point, with screened devices displaying default imagery
Beyond a task helper, customers also want Alexa to personalize experiences by recommending relevant content based on their interests.
Research
To ensure we had the right level of detail on the initial product, I created a prototype to test with 60+ Alexa users. After organizing hundreds of customer insights in an affinity diagramming exercise, I drafted a report that summarized high level insights and recommendations used by the product team to determine what the minimum loveable product is.
Is an audio-only product enough, or should there be visuals included as well? How do customers feel about these experiences in general?
Based on research, customers want a combined audio visual product that includes culturally relevant figures and media
Product Definition
After deciding that the theme experience will be a combined audio-visual product, the product, design and engineering team then worked together to define four core customer touchpoints:
Discovery
Enablement (Opting in)
Theme experience
Opting out & management
User Flows
As the UX lead for themes, I was tasked with breaking down these major touch points into executable experiences. To orient myself, I started by learning about the current state of discovery channels, technological constraints and user flows. I then created and end to end user flow for the themes product, where I identified customer decision points, friction, and Alexa processes. Finally, once the flow was reviewed with the team, I then started pursuing how to execute the specific steps in the flow with the appropriate teams across Alexa.
This high level flow shows the how customers interact with the four core components of a theme: Discovery, opt in, theme experience, and opting out.
Expanded out, the four core touchpoints differ for customers depending on the channel of discovery and the modality of the device. The goal is to offer customers on all types of Alexa devices equivalent immersion, opportunity for discovery and levers for management.
Learning and Exploration
Discovery
There are numerous ways people can discover an Alexa Theme. For our initial launch, it was important we narrowed in on specific high volume channels to meet resourcing and time constraints.
When researching the different methods of discovery, I examined each on volume of traffic and the types of users that were ingressing. The focus is getting as many impressions for Alexa Echo owners who can take immediate action (enable the Theme).
To include both power users and casual users, it was also important to consider the visibility of the discovery channels. For instance, if the promotion is on a page in the Alexa App that takes multiple taps to see.
With those decision points, we narrowed down on a few channels to prioritize finding placement on.
In order to cater to both Alexa power users, and entice new users, Themes discovery should cover a variety of different touchpoints.
Theme Visual Experience
While conversation designers led the voice component of the experience, I led the visual vision and execution Themes. At the time of the Themes launch, there were four different types of Echos with screens to consider, along with various other considerations.
Challenges
A variety of aspect ratios
Themed images need to be adjusted for each type of Echo Show, for 5 different screen sizes
Volume of images
Customers want a variety of images and fresh content
Latency
Imagery needs to meet resolution requirements while staying under a certain size
Accessibility
Themes span across different experiences like weather, alarms, timers with their own UIs and safe zones. Images need to account for these experiences
Given these constraints, I then dove into existing image upload tools, guidance, and safe zones for different experiences. After understanding how to produce visuals, I then asked myself:
How might we scale the production of high quality assets across different aspect ratios, UI constraints, while minimizing latency?
Education and Management
Once a customer discovers a theme, the next step is to educate them about the theme experience.
Themes are unique in that their runtime persists across multiple sessions until the customer opts out. The current standard for Alexa experiences is single session.
Current Skill Experience
Theme Experience
To solve these issues, I explored several guardrails to remind customers that a theme is active. These explorations include, a persistent indicator on the home screen denoting that the theme is enabled, voice reminders after long periods of time to remind customers about the theme, and error messaging for customer inquiries like, “Alexa, why did you say that?” I also explored options to manage the theme in settings like profiles.
Multi-session experiences like themes lead to friction when customers either forget that they’ve opted in, and/or customers share an Alexa device with others in a household and haven’t communicated to others about enabling the theme.
Designs for Launch
Discovery
The goal was to maximize reach and conversion across different Amazon platforms, while while offering non-intrusive and natural ways for Alexa and Amazon.com customers to discover themes.
To execute the Amazon.com and on device discovery placements, I worked with partner teams to scope out necessary requirements. I then helped to create UX guidance and assets for production.
Channel: Amazon.com
Customers: Amazon shoppers, both non-Alexa and Alexa users
Strength: Amazon’s retail site gets the most traffic, with hundreds of millions of customers per day. There’s also an opportunity to increase the number of Alexa users with promoting Alexa content.
Weakness: Not all Amazon.com customers are Alexa users, meaning that the content may be irrelevant
Amazon.com Landing Banner
Super Mario Bros. Movie Theme
All customers landing on Amazon.com homepage will see the rotating banner promoting the enablement phrase for a theme
Alexa Homepage Landing Banner
All customers landing on Amazon.com/Alexa will see the rotating banner sponsoring Alexa specific content.
Channel: Email
Customers: Alexa customers who sign up for weekly emails
Strength: Reaches power users who are interested in new feature discovery
Weakness: Low volume, as email is opt in only
Alexa Weekly Friday Email
Alexa app power users who have subscribed to email notifications can discover things to try
Channel: Alexa devices
Customers: Real time Alexa customers using their devices
Strength: Contextual recommendations, and a means for immediate usage
Weakness: More intrusive, can be seen as pushy by customers
Voice Recommendations
After certain, relevant Alexa interactions, Alexa will proactively append a recommendation or something to try
Home Screen Cards
For screened Echo devices, customers see rotating home cards when the device is not in use. These home cards include hints at the bottom corner for a non-intrusive way of promoting a theme
Theme Visual Experience
Each theme has its own distinct color scheme, and visual direction to maintain consistency across the experience. I worked to define the visual style using brand guidelines, moodboarding, and input from partners and the design team.
When it comes to production, each theme consists of various images that need to be re-adjusted to the right spec, cropped to fit different aspect ratios, documented and pushed into production.
In order to produce multiple themes at a time, it was necessary to onboard additional hands to help with image upload, documentation and production. To streamline, I developed several guides and processes, that ultimately cut the production time for visuals by 1/4.
Figma templates that lays out safe zones, aspect ratios, and accessibility checks for each of the experiences included in a theme
Step by step image curation, upload, and cropping instructions for various Echo show aspect ratios
Image requirements guide that defines asset needs, such as resolution requirements and quantity of images. The goal was to meet a high customer experience while working with limitations like technical latency and operational capacity.
Education and Management
Using a novel landing screen and UX pattern for voice messaging when a theme is enabled, we can help paint a clear picture of what the theme experience is, and how to opt out.
To keep the customers from facing information overload, I created a UX pattern that prioritizes telling customers the most crucial information they need. Firstly, customers need to know that Alexa heard them correctly (confirmation), next customers need to know how to opt out (management), and finally, they need to be pointed to a starting experience.
Pattern
Confirmation
Management/Disablement
Starting the experience
After enablement, we subtly remind customers how to opt out throughout the experience by leveraging rotating home cards.
Continuing to improve after launch
To create an even more end to end immersive experience for customers, after launching, we partnered with other teams across Alexa to add more experiences into Themes.
Bringing in an integrated home experience with smart lights
Extending utility use cases with setting reminders
Displaying ambient imagery to FireTVs around the world
Creating an easier ticket buying experience on multimodal devices
Delighting customers with 3D avatars of their favorite characters
But there are still many improvements to make
How might we consider education about activated themes on communal devices to those in a multi-person household?
How might we better cater relevant content to customers based on affinity?
How might we remind customers about an active theme that they might have forgotten about?
Takeaways
Scalability is important and reliant on guideline definition, production and tooling improvements
Sometimes you can’t get the perfect customer experience on the first go
It’s crucial to monitor what your customers are saying, and tweak the product
Negotiation and collaboration with other partner teams to balance each other’s goals leads to mutual benefit
Maintain a high level vision of the end goal, but understand that pivots happen, and adapt