Amazon Alexa
Top Skills Card Multi-Content Exploration
MY ROLE
UX designer on Ambient Home Discovery team.
THE PROBLEM
Alexa “Skills” can acquire customers, but has a difficult time retaining them. The goal was to explore ways to help fix this issue, and increase Skill retention and activation rates.
RESEARCH
Research was completed by the Amazon Device and Services Design Group that summarized all key learnings to date related to skill retention, and listed all products that can help individual skill retention.
I leveraged these findings and use the data to experiment with various design iterations to surface a best solution.
PROPOSED EXPERIMENT
My hypothesis was that updating the Top Skills card to feature more skills at a glance will increase skill retention and increase customer activation.
CARD REQUIREMENTS
· Title of card
· Icon of skill
· Name of skill
· Secondary marketing text (optional)
· Utterance for each top skill
· Allow users to take an action via touch for each skill
TOOLS
Sketch, Quip, Adobe Photoshop, pen & paper.
Current Top Skills Card CX
Much of the current Top Skills card is blank space, only showing one Top Skill.
Page components are:
· Icon of skill
· Title of card
· Skill rating
· Utterance for top skills
Current Top Skills card design
Card Component Requirements
Some components are required for this new card including:
1. Icon of skill
2. Title of card
3. Name of skill
4. Secondary marketing text (optional)
5. Utterance for each top skill
6. Allow users to take an action via touch for each skill
Required card components
Explorations
My hypothesis was that adding more Top Skills at a glance will help customers with individual skill retention and activation, as well as possibly address a customer pain point of forgetting which skills they’ve enabled.
Design iterations explored layouts displaying various sets of skills: two, three and four skills at a glance. I leveraged other existing template designs including: Top Skills, Alexa For Your Day (AFYD), Shopping, and Smart Home templates. These templates had components that were similar to the required components needed in this new card design. Leveraging other existing templates would save cost as well as valuable engineering time.
Two skills at a glance
Three skills at a glance
Four skills at a glance
Top design explorations
After presenting design explorations, two top choices surfaced:
TWO SKILLS AT A GLANCE
The first top design choice displays two top skills at once. This CX would be easiest for customers to view from 6 feet or less while helping individual skill retention.
This design has all of the required components including: title of card, icon of skill, utterance for each top skill, and allows users to take an action via touch for each skill. Combining the name of the skill within the utterance hint text could allow less clutter on the page while meeting the component requirements.
The design leverages an existing card layout (Smart Home) which can save valuable time and cost.
FOUR SKILLS AT A GLANCE
This list view design allows users to view four skills at once. This CX would allow customers to quickly see multiple skills with just one glance while also helping with skill retention.
This layout has all of the required components including:
title of card, icon of skill, name of skill, utterance for each top skill, and allows users to take an action via touch for each skill.
The design also leverages an existing card layout (Smart Home) which can save valuable time and cost.
Winning design:
Two skills at a glance
Accessibility
The ‘two skills at a glance’ design won out over the the ‘four skills at a glance’ layout mainly because of possible accessibility/readability issues. Presenting two skills at once is much easier for users to read from 6 feet away or less, while also helping individual skill retention.
Requirements
Combining the name of the skill within the utterance hint text allowed less clutter on the page while meeting the component requirements.
Final design
The final design leverages an existing ‘shapes’ graphic background treatment that was recommended from the Amazon Device and Services Design Group (DDG). This background is consistent with the Amazon Alexa brand and doesn’t compete with the various skill iconography.