Design Practice Innovation
Alexa Social
Design Practice Innovation
Alexa Social
Alexa Social was a net-new organization formed to increase the utility of Alexa through increasing the number of interactions. Alexa Social today is a multimodal voice + touch experience that allows users to 'follow' news, 'share' photos, music, and links, and 'react.'
The first voice + touch Social product for Alexa was launched on an aggressive one-year timeline. To identify the unique voice trigger phrase to evoke the feature, I implemented an innovative Feed Utterance Study research across 7 different feeds and uncovered bigger problems with customer’s mental model across the ecosystem. This 'meta' insight led to improvements in design practice across Alexa.
Challenge
​
-
There was no initial research upfront on the mental model because it was assumed that a ‘social feed’ was a well-established paradigm from social media.
-
The team had an aggressive timeline, goal to launch within a year, and a bias for action.
-
There are a limited number of Alexa trigger words possible since many are already taken for other experiences.
-
New trigger words are time-consuming and costly to implement, but mostly they need to be meaningful and unique.
Alexa, show me my news feed.
Alexa, pull up top songs.
Alexa, go to celeb news.
Alexa, show me updates about Adele.
Alexa, show me my notifications.
Research revealed a wide range of trigger phrases
​
What unique words do customers need to say to trigger Alexa to initiate the social feed? (the "golden utterance")
Key Activities
​
-
Conducted remote research to answer product questions and expanded the scope to provide insights needed by the broader org.
-
Developed practice insight as meta observation
-
Reviewed organizational knowledge-base to verify gap
-
Took the opportunity to present point-of-view at design conference (the only researcher presenting)
Methodology
​
-
Conducted a voice study (Feed Utterance) study across 7 different feeds
-
Remote usability study via User Testing (n=140)
These 7 different 'feeds' were the stimuli used in the study. Each of these coexist in the live production experience. It was key to test this feature in this eco-system context.
Impact
-
Beyond the insights and recommendations around the voice commands, this study provided insight into 'meta' problems and solutions within the development process.
-
Established a cadence for this research in the roadmap for early stage concepts.
-
Saved resources later on in the development cycle by bringing in voice designers at the start of the project
-
Improved quality of design practice and shortened design cycle.
-
Published the case study learnings internally and presented at the Amazon internal Conversation Design Summit.
Sharing the 'meta' learnings at Amazon's Internal Conversation Design Summit, Oct 2022
"It was great speaking at Amazon’s Conversation Design Summit yesterday in Seattle about how we are advancing our practice knowledge in our approach to designing multimodal product experiences. It was fun reconnecting with friends and talking about research and design! Posting a few pictures." See LinkedIn post.